I was browsing Wiggle the other day and happened across these rather attractive looking, from an aesthetic and spec perspective, minimalist running shoes from Inov-8...

These are the Inov-8 Bare-X 180

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Sunday saw me take part in my first half marathon in over 13 years, the Reading Half Marathon, and what a brilliant race it was.

As you may have read back in November, I took the plunge and entered the Reading Half Marathon and continued with the MAF training principals exclusively with the idea I'd going into my race with at least a great aerobic base and possibly missing some speed. This was a bit of a gamble as I'd never heard anyone train like this before and had certainly never taken this approach myself. Seeing as I hadn't done a half marathon in a while, I thought "What the heck. It'll be an interesting experiment. Worst case scenario, I blow it. Best case, I finish the race strong and get the sub-90 minute finish time I'd be aiming for".

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Over the Christmas holidays, I was compelled (a visit was due anyway) to return to sunny South Africa for the first time in five years - my first Christmas back in SA in 7 years - by my cousin's desire to marry a gun-toting children's pastor (lovely chap).

As part of my holiday back home, I decided I'd venture out to see what South Africa's first and only (at the moment) parkrun was like. It'd been a very very very long time since I last ran in South Africa, let alone raced, and from the one other run I'd had in Jo'burg during my hols, a gentle 10k, I knew it would be a toughie.

So nice and early on Christmas eve, I bundled my wife into the car and we headed down to Delta Park for a quick spin round the park (me - my wife doesn't run). We got there with about half an hour to spare so I could warm up and introduce myself to the organiser - the one and only, Bruce Fordyce

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I work across the Thames from the Redgrave Pinsent Rowing Lake and on many occasions I've thought to myself, "Can you run round the Redgrave Pinsent Rowing Lake?". I've plotted a route on Google Maps on several occasions and it appeared do-able, but never actually tried it, until today .

Last week I noticed them doing some severe mowing over on that side of the river so today I thought I'd go see if I could run right round and answer that question...

Can you run round the Redgrave Pinsent Rowing Lake?

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Somehow I missed this when I added my last training run, but check it out, I've tipped over the 1000km mark for my running this year:

Assuming I put in about 200km a month for the rest of the year (not likely), I could crack the 1000 mile mark this year. I'm not going to aim for it, but we'll see how we get on.

Well folks, I'm pleased to say I succeeded in my challenge to run at least 3km every day for 30 days as my Calendar page from Garmin Connect can attest:

This was a great challenge and one I'm going to come back to, but maybe not quite so rigidly or with so much gusto at the start of the month.

As part of doing my 30-day challenge, I decided I would NOT give myself a training programme to follow. I would just run and listen to my body, with the exception that I would do a long run on the weekend. If I felt good and felt I could go fast, I did. If I felt like plodding, I did. This worked really well and I ended up only wearing my Garmin to record my route and distance as evidence of my progress and only checked it at the end of each run. It's quite refreshing just running again without any trying to run to clock or beeping pacer. I think I'm going to start doing this more often.

Now forcing myself to run everyday has taught me a few very important things. Running every day is fantastic, when you're up for, but you MUST listen to your body and take a break when it says you need one. If you don't and you run, you won't enjoy it and may start to resent it. You're also likely to incur aches and pains and niggles or even a full on injury if you don't.

I think I may have gone out a bit too far a few times in the first 3 and a bit weeks and by Friday the 26, I really wasn't up for running and starting to feel a little over-trained. This is when I'd normally take a day or two off, but didn't as I was aiming to complete this challenge.

Sadly, I've had to force myself to take a break after 30 days. I find myself feeling a little over-trained with my right hip flexor a little tender after runs. I wouldn't call it an injury, just an annoying niggle that wasn't there before.

I'll give myself the best part of a week off and start a similar challenge again, but this time without any rigid goals. Who knows, maybe 3 long hard weeks is my limit and maybe the 4th needs to be considerably lower in mileage than I did. Only time will tell.

One thing I'm very impressed with is the monthly total: 231.18k of running.

Over on my personal site I've just written about Matt Cutt's brilliant idea of doing or not doing something for 30 days straight. Given today is the first of the month so as good a time as any, I'd decided I'm going to do my own little challenges.

I'm starting with something easy...

I'm going to run at least 3km everyday for 30 days

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11 days ago I ran the third of three of the Queen Mother Reservoir 10k races in the series. This was my first and probably last running of this race.

The 10k race is a very very flat two lap race around the top of the Queen Mother Reservoir

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On Sunday 22 May 2011, I ran the Stoke Row 10k for the first time. It's a relatively close race to home, but the thing that sold it for me was free music festival in the pub gardens afterwards. I thought this would be a great opportunity for my wife to have something to do whilst I run around the 'burbs and it would also make the run a bit of a "grand day out", which it proved to be, but we'll get onto the day's entertainment in a moment. First the race.

First, the race description...

The 10k route will start and finish at The Cherry Tree Inn, Stoke Row, taking you through some beautiful undulating Oxfordshire Countryside. Starting at 10.30 am, you will be chip timed, have water stops, plenty of clear route signage and marshalls.

This is pertinent as "undulating" is probably a little tame, but "hilly" is a bit too severe. This is quite a tough run as the elevation graph from my Garmin shows...

As you can see, there's quite a bit of climbing involved. It is also mostly offroad which the race description doesn't mention. It would have been good to know this in advance as I would have liked to have tackled it in my Merrells.

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Well, we find ourselves in the middle of 2011, not quite slap bang in the middle, but near enough for me to provide a mid-year update.

Training

So far my training programme has suited me well, though I will be making a slight change. Since the beginning of December last year, I've been working on the following schedule:

• Monday: run - usually a hard session
• Tuesday: swim - usually about 2.5km
• Wednesday: run - varies between easy and hard, depending how I feel
• Thursday: full body weights session
• Friday: run - usually a longish tempo run
• Saturday and Sunday: either race or rest

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