I am Karl Pilkington

Tonight I learned a valuable lesson to take forwards with my half marathon training. Essentially I know nothing about running and I am an idiot.

Yes I am

Why do I think this? Well, to date I've been making things up as I go along. A bit of running here, a bit of running there. I've not followed any particular plan or schedule, and have just been getting by on my own instincts. When I wasn't feeling 100 per cent a couple of weeks back, I listened to my body and held off on the training front. So far so good.

On Sunday I ran 10 kilometres. I've never run further, and so by default that was my long run for the week. If you look through simple training plans, such as this one following a long run should come a rest day and then an easy/recovery run. Yesterday I rested. Today I should have been a recovery run. Only I knew better and had greater ambitions. I wanted to raise the bar a bit higher and get up to the 8 mile mark tonight.

I felt pretty fresh and had no ill effects from Sunday's exertions. But it soon became apparent that my body wasn't up to anything challenging this evening. Unfortunately having set out for a long run, this epiphany occurred only after I had run 4 and a half kilometres away from the house. Clearly a ploddy run around the block would have served me better tonight, rather than find myself a long way from home. The journey back was a patchy mix of walking and running. My apps tells me in total I ran just over 7.5km which is still a good workout, but well below what I was aiming for.

So today I've learned that I don't know best. I'm going to formalise my training schedule and listen to the advice of people who know a lot more about this running lark than I do. I've still got 7 and a half weeks to get this right, and I will.

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