Early morning brain stress

If only I had paid more attention during maths lessons with Mr Fairman in 1979...  Instead, he would throw chalk at us to get our attention.  Anyway, I was mourning my abysmal maths ability again this morning at training.  My coach Linda always gives us clear instructions about how far to run and at what pace.  However, it's up to us to work out the maths of that pace.  So, today we were to start at our marathon pace and decrease it by five seconds each set and we had to do three sets of 2km etc etc....  Arrrghhh!  Happily, I am not the only one in the group who is perplexed - time and time again.  And trying to pace myself - well, I am HOPELESS.  One minute I am running at 5:36 and the next at 6:01.  This morning's run was so pretty though, with gorgeous real estate to admire.  We even had a rainbow like the one below.

I was feeling quite fatigued this morning so elected to do the half-marathon training rather than the full.  My left buttock/hip (read: back) is really hurting and I feel generally run down.  I was not the only one feeling like this so a few of us decided to take it a little easier today.  I have never pushed myself physically so hard before and my stamina is not as good as others.  On the run home, I came across a small fluffy puppy who was running about freely on the road, almost causing mayhem amongst a pelliton of cyclists. I called it over and then it wanted to follow me. I couldn't work out where it had come from and all the houses were locked up, sound asleep (lucky buggers).  Luckily, an elderly lady with a fenced yard took the cute little thing and was going to call the Council, otherwise I would have been stuck with one small wiggly pup and another 1.5kms of run back to the car and a mad dash about trying to find an owner before getting to work!  It looked a tiny bit like this fellow below...  I would have quite liked to keep it but that would go down Really (not) Well with my four-legged family.

So, all in all, an exciting morning of training!  Sunday is about 28kms apparently so looking forward to that - eeek!  Oooh, my latest purchase (to add to my rapidly rising running spends).  Yesterday also found me eyeing off a tube of Voltaren gel....