Well, hopefully most of you guessed but my ‘retirement’ blog from yesterday was of course in honour of ‘April Fool’s day’.  It did make me laugh to see threads of my ‘retirement’ end up on letsrun.com and eightlane.com, as well as many comments and hits on the blog itself.

I have said this before but I will never officially retire, as I think you have to be of a certain standard to be allowed to announce this. I think a good rule, would be a major games medal and no, that does not include the relays medals! Once a friend at our local club came up as if someone had died and announce that ‘so and so had retired’, the guys was like 25 and had a few injuries but was barley national standard. I have never laughed so hard in my life, as sure enough a few weeks later this athlete was back out of ‘retirement’ and running in the relays again. I will myself will be one of those athletes that run and race until I drop, I climbed the ladder and it will be time to go back down in the next few years (not yet) and in this time I can really enjoy events and the people I have met over the years.

I did though read a couple of nice comments on some of the threads and two were about the Bristol running resource interview I did.

 http://www.bristolrunningresource.org.uk/running-blog/2009/3/17/interview-james-thie.html

Reading it back, I do realise how much fun I have had in the sport, and how much I have got out of my own limited talent. I think that’s one of the reasons why I am getting involved in so much coaching, as if I can help someone with ‘that extra gear’ then there is no reason why they can’t run so much faster than I did. Also I made a lot of training mistakes over the years, which again I would like to think my athletes will not repeat under my guidance.

That aside, training has gone much better this week, I ran 6 miles on Monday and on Wednesday I even did a half session with a Welsh schools champion that I am coaching. It was nice to feel like I was running again at anything quicker than jogging pace, and I feel ready to start cranking it up over the next few weeks.

I do have a few things on over the next few weeks. As in 9 days it will be the first Runnerslife wedding, as I get married to my lovely fiancée Alex, on the 11^th April. Then we are straight out to Las Vegas on honeymoon for the week , and in that week we have a Elvis blessing at the little white chapel- just for fun!

So will keep you posted and thanks for reading

Cheers james