These last few days i've been struggling with not feeling too well. Going back to last Wednesday I had some injections for Kenya and I was told I could have some side effects of flu like symptoms from the Yellow Fever vaccination. They've been lingering about since the weekend, I thought they'd gone but after running a pretty hard progression tempo yesterday morning with Beattie they reappeared yesterday afternoon. Thankfully they're only symptoms and they're not effecting my running, it's just a case of letting these symptoms slowly disappear by not over doing it. 

So today i'm forced to give myself a day off, I suppose it can't be that bad as i've had a very heavy last few days. It's a bit frustrating as I wanted to get a good mileage week in with a low key cross country race on the end of it. My plan is to do the North East Harrier League on Saturday, something i'm looking forward too. I have not raced in the North East since the Blaydon back in June and i've not done a cross race for a good 3 years. 

Apart from these dodgy flu symptoms everything in my training has been going great, I had a good build up to the relays last weekend. I did a sub max VO2 on the Tuesday before the race and then after getting some good results John gave me the bad news of- "go and do 10x400 off 60 now." I was a little tired but it was only a sub max test so i'd really only done 6 minutes of really hard running and I only went up to 21kph. 

A sub max test consists of starting at a determined pace- mine was 16kph and then every 3 minutes the speed goes up by 1 and the physiologists take a blood sample to measure the lactate in the body. My lactates came back lower compared to the test I did during the summer. The reason for that can be for a number of reasons such as i'm doing more strength work at the moment but I think I have moved on from then anyway so it's looking promising over the longer distances for me now.

Since the relays at the weekend I've been getting my head down racking up the miles with Beattie. He's in good shape and after being disappointed with his Commonwealth 10k he's looking to bounce back at the Great South Run this weekend. We did a 9mile progression run yesterday in the morning. I was pretty wacked going into the 9th mile but it's my weakness so it's good to do that sort of thing to work on it. For anyone who knows the Loughborough Club runs we did it round the 9.5 loop and the final mile has Thorpe Hill in it which is not what you want at the end! We moved round the town nicely, we cruised past Tesco (the 3mile point) at 6 min miles then we pushed on after that. I think in the end we were comfortably sub 50 for 9miles which was good going. I didn't like the way the last mile was so that will only come with time I guess and having John comfortable helping me along was a massive boost. 

The rest of the week is going to be steady running I imagine now. I may have turned my legs tomorrow had I been out earlier this morning with the group but because i've had a day off I'll need to make sure i'm ok to crack on with training so I guess John will say steady running only. I'll link up with Ryan Stephenson when I go home for some runs as he's starting to really get back into training now after struggling for a few years with an injury. 

I'll update soon on how the rest of the week goes for me and if I end up racing the Harrier League on Saturday.