This weekend feels like it has been such a long one, I think the main cause of that was the travelling. Stirling is such a distance to travel on a coach! I can't knock the team though, we had a great laugh all the way there, during the weekend and all the way back.

Last Sunday I finished one of my hardest ever weeks and was absolutely wreaked, I took a few easy days, got a good Tuesday session in but felt petty heavy legged in it. Again I just continued on taking this fairly easy ticking over to get ready for BUCS xc. We set off 8am Friday on our 7 hour bus journey to Scotland. I've never been on a long coach journey where the bus didn't have a toilet, but Loughborough Athletic Union's idea of cost cutting is ******* ridiculous- excuse my language, but when but you're trying to stay well hydrated for a race and the bus is only stopping a couple times in 7 hours you're going to need to go more than twice during that time.

I got the Stirling and went for an easy run to get the journey out my legs, this helped me as it was pretty cramped up with the bus full and not much room to stretch out. Again, on Saturday morning I stretched my legs before the race and felt ok jogging round the golf course near the hotel.

The race had a good course, it had plenty of good running in parts, a few challenging hills and a few soggy bits under foot. I liked the look of it but my legs didn't like the feel of it once I got going! I set of quite relaxed and steady on the first small lap, with 3 large laps to come. As we started the first large lap I slowly moved through the lads at the front and then dropped in behind Vernon. I relaxed and felt comfortable running along just until I hit the first big hill... my legs went heavy and I lost momentum! I pushed on off the top and they started to feel a bit better on the downhill but when I reached the next hill they did the same again. My legs were just feeling as if i'd done a long hard run and this was my warm down. 

I knew it wasn't going to be my day today and I was still tired off all the training i'd been doing so I just battled on through the race to help the team. I finished in 13th position overall and pretty disappointed with my run but I know i'm running a lot better than what my performance suggested. I will put it behind me and concentrate on the AAA's indoors this weekend where I'll hopefully feel a little more at home on a track. Thankfully the team did finish in 3rd place behind St Mary's and  Birmingham, we weren't really going to beat St Mary's and Birmingham were possibly in reach but Goolab had a flyer so I don't think we'd have beaten them.

When you're training hard you can't really expect to ease down for every race and although I did back off training leading into BUCS my legs just didn't recover in time. My coaches both agreed with this and just told me to forget about it and concentrate on getting recovering well for my next race.

Now it's time to freshen up and get my legs turning ready for the short indoor track season! The AAA's 3k looks like it's going to be a great race with plenty of quick guys and I think it could well be the race of the weekend so i'd suggest watching out for it if it's on tv this weekend, i think it was on Channel 4 last year.

I'll get an update on how training goes this week before the AAA's