Horrific amounts of snow and slippery surfaces are still forcing me to stay off-road at the moment. I slip walking on the pavements so I don't even want to know what will happen if I run on them. So like when I was in London, I've adopted a park and done all my running around there. I'm fortunate enough to have a park, Selly Oak Park, backing on to my house so I've been using that. The uni use it for reps during the winter and I think Dave Sunderland's group have been spotted there so it's quite a good park for reps. The loop I use starts off on a flat bit, chucks a right and then you go up a hill, run on some more flat and then start a gentle descent with the loop ending on some more flat. This loop happens to be the longest loop I can find in the park, sticking right to the edges.

I've been using this loop since Saturday, both my sessions were on it and including today 5 runs, but today was the day the park broke me. I did an hour round there earlier and after 3 laps I was hanging by a thread, my legs were sooooo tired. The hill is the worst bit by a long way, why just thinking about it is making me tired. Up until Tuesday I was doing ok, the snow wasn't too thick and I was going up the hill at a reasonable pace. But after yesterday's restocking of snow, the hill has got the better of me. I reckon if a snail was to start at the bottom of the hill the same time as me it would get to the top before I do. As soon as I hit it, I can't lift my legs and it feels as though I'm jogging up. Before the hill was still hard to run up, but I had the rest of the loop to recover as the snow wasn't too deep. But now, the whole loop is well and truly covered and I'm constantly running through thick snow and it's killing me, there's no time to get some freshness back. I finished the run but I sit here a broken man, almost defeated.

Since last Sunday I've counted 47 laps of the park, so I suppose with the snow it was bound to get me sometime. Fortunately tomorrow I get a break from that place as Steve wants me to run somewhere else and see if it's clear of snow so we can do a session on Saturday. But unless thing's clear up by Sunday, I'll be returning there to do 75 mins of running. This is obviously a prospect I'm not looking forward to, but as the saying goes "whatever dosen't kill you makes you stronger". Despite the mental toughness brought about from this monotonous endeavour, hopefully I should come out physically stronger. With BUCS coming up and the race being 10k, I need all the strength I can get as that's quite a distance to run over cross-country. With or without BUCS, until the pavements recapture some friction, laps and laps of Selly Oak Park will be the order of the day. I don't really mind it that much, I've started getting used to it and the MP3 player helps keep me entertained and anyways, it's becoming more and more of a challenge I want to conquer.

Stay safe,

Goolab xxx