Welcome back. Buzzing to have you on the Team. You did great. I still have fond memories of you collecting that Merit Trophy at the Awards Night, which was well deserved for your efforts.

Did we then push a bit too hard? Possibly. But everything is a learning curve and I feel like I’m a better coach now than when we last teamed up, so hopefully we can get you back in good shape.

Consistency!! It’s everything. If someone asked me to secret to being a better runner, it’s simply keep turning up. Whether it’s 3 or 4 times a week, just keep doing it. Yes we’ll always miss the odd session due to work or illness, that’s not a problem, but it’s when 3 runs becomes 2 or even 1 a week you’ll start to lose that fitness, and looking at your Strava in recent months that’s all that’s happened.

You don’t need to do anything special, you don’t have to give it your all in every single run you do, in fact I think you could benefit from slowing down a little sometimes. But just be consistent.

It’s that sentiment which builds the foundation of this training plan. If you continue to get those 3 runs per week in, I think you’ll be in good shape come Hastings Half Marathon.

Then I think at that point it would be a decision for you, to decide how much commitment you wanted to put in over the winter to train (hopefully) for the London Marathon. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

The first 4 weeks are all about easy running. We want to get back into good habits and rebuild your fitness. We need to be patient and if you start smashing out too many sessions too quickly you’ll get injured.

I’ve got 3 runs per week at the moment. There is the potential, if you wanted, to do a 4th, but that would mean cutting the Sunday long run back a little. But we can decide on a week to week basis.

Once we’ve got that baseline fitness back, we introduce the Tuesday efforts. I know. They are tough. But to achieve anything in life, at times you are going have to work hard. Luckily with running most of the miles we do are easy, but from time to time we need to push ourselves out of our comfort zone.

The benefit of being available on Tuesdays is you get to do those sessions with the Team and have the support of others. That’s huge.

I’ll add some really basic S&C work in, which you can do at home, starting with just 10 minute sessions, so no excuses. No weights needed. Nothing. Just 10 mins of your time. Set the timer and off you go. Then we’ll build on that slowly.

The work you do now, is for yourself in 5 years time. That’s one of my favourite quotes.

Not much else to add. Keep showing up. I’ve always had a lot of respect for you as a runner and I know the potential you have. In my opinion there’s every reason to believe your best times are ahead of you, if that’s something you wanted to strive for.

Let’s do this!!