So i'm back in Font Romeu and as some of you may know I had a bit of a journey to make it. After all the volcanic ash rubbish. Lewis Moses, Jonny Mellor, Matt Bowser and I were all left thinking what to do. I had the idea of driving as it's one thing I love to do anyway so I mentioned it to the lads and they all seemed keen. I then looked into ferry prices which were very cheap, £80! I priced it all up roughly and the lads all agreed to it so that was it, decision made!

We set off at 6am last Sunday, met Jonny Thiewlis, Bruce Raeside, Ricky Challinor and Joe Townsend at Leicester services and made our way down to Dover for the 10am ferry. After getting off the ferry around 12:30 French time and made our way on our monster journey! We passed through Paris about 4:30pm and then headed south reaching toulouse close to 9pm. We made our final stop and set off on the final part of the journey up the mountains.

Scenic pictures taken from Alasdair Donaldson's Facebook.

We reached Font-Romeu just after 1am after covering 940miles of driving. It was worth it in the end though, the drive was fantastic and we had a great laugh in the car the whole way. We did however manage to drop Thewlis on the way. He was about 400mile from Font-Romeu and decided to pull over and stop at 11pm and arrive about 5pm the next afternoon.

So far training has gone really well, the first 3 days were really easy and we did our first little session on the 4th day. We had 5x2mins at tempo pace and John said to me just enjoy bringing my heart rate going up and down. After that session my next one was on the Saturday where we did a tempo round the trail around the track and then we drove 5mins away to the mountain road where we did a hill session which absolutely killed me! I loved it though. The session was a 3min rep then of 1min all off 90sec and 3mins between sets. We just continuously ran up the mountain up to a pretty high altitude! 

My next session was on the track, 5x 1k, 400 off 2mins. It was the first real test and John set times that I would achieve as he never knew what my body would be like when getting adapted to the altitude. I felt fine and was working really well so I hit some good times in the end which puts me in decent 5k shape at the moment, and most importantly on course to hit some pb's this summer.

Since then I have been just been easy and steady running getting ready for tomorrow's session where I am doing another hill session. This time we're doing tempo again followed by 45second hills, something a little faster so I imagine Lewis will make me work very hard as it's his type of session!

There's a cracking group out here, the guys i've been training with are, Moses, Mellor, Raeside, Thewlis, Bowser, Challinor, Moralee, Townsend, Clowes & Toole. We've all been working really well together and getting some great runs done. The spirit within the camp is fantastic and hats off to UK Athletics for organising such a great camp. I was in the very fortunate position of coming here last year to test the place out and it was deemed a great place to train which led to the camp being organised this year. So I'd like to thank everyone at UK Athletics for allowing me here again this year, hopefully I can reward them with some fast times and medals this summer.

I'l update you guys with some more pictures and another blog with what's happening out here. I'll also try and get Bowser to get his arse into gear too to update!