From miffed to chuffed, in 4.5 miles

I've been having a bit of a crisis of confidence since my 17 miler at the weekend. I don't remember feeling so tired after a run - races yes, but training runs no. I am starting to worry that this new higher mileage schedule is a bit too much for my soon-to-be-40 year old legs.

Last night, after a day of zigzagging across London for various meetings (one of which was totally forgotten by the person I was meeting, despite a reminder on Friday) and eating crappy meeting food, I came home and headed out for a shortish run. The schedule said 5 miles but I just wanted to get out and clear my head. It's great weather this week - even an evening run doesn't require the same number of layers of clothing and I felt really quite free as I was running. I didn't feel particularly fresh or lively, instead quite sluggish, but then I put that down to tiredness and the poor diet of the day. I had wolfed down a low-fat rice pudding about 15 minutes before heading out, to make sure I had some carbohydrate in there somewhere.

Well, the rice pudding might have had some effect, because after 3 miles of running I started to feel really good. I felt like I was picking up a lot of pace, but decided not to check my pace and just run and go with my feelings rather than the GPS. It was good - I felt good. Surprisingly good, given how exhausted I had felt the day before. So I ran another 1.5 miles home, feeling exceptionally strong and pretty convinced I had posted a magic mile.

As you can imagine, when I checked my splits, I was pretty disappointed to note that I hadn't really been that speedy at all. My fastest mile was 9m 21sec, which was a lot slower than it seemed out there on the street. Disappointed, I showered, ate and sat on the sofa wondering if my mind was starting to play tricks on me.

But of course, I am a sad statto of a runner so I couldn't resist checking my statistics in more detail. According to the stats, I was 1 min:10 sec faster than mile 3 in my final mile - hence the feeling of speed I had got when I was running. But, more importantly for my confidence, I realised that the route I took home was a consistent gradient. I'd basically run my fastest mile uphill all the way.

I'm still a little bit worried about the mileage on my schedule - especially as it's going to be a tough work week and difficult to fit miles in - but at least I get the odd glimpse of progress, even at my advanced age.

Maybe I can run that marathon after all.