Tomorrow is the 9th half marathon in the Northern Ireland Half Marathon series, the pen-ultimate one, and it is Groomsport.  From the course map, the course looks like it will be challenging with a number of steep hills, however I have never ran Groomsport before, so there is an air of the unknown, sometimes a good thing, and sometimes a bad thing in that you cannot mentally prepare yourself for a particular tough stretch of the course.

Typically the day before a half marathon I wont do a long run, however due to the fact I am away this weekend, I had to fit in my 10 mile run today, thankfully I was on leave and could fit it in during the middle of the day, hopefully giving my legs enough time to recover for tomorrow night.  Timewise tomorrow, I dont think I am back to the fitness levels to challenge at 1hr30mins time, however I would like to get under 1hr34mins, as that would be another bit of progress after Cookstown.  The main focus will be to tick another half marathon completed, and move closer to completing the series, anything else is a bonus.

The search for a new pair of Nike Structure is not prooving fruitful, as stocks of size 10’s are limited, and to be honest I badly need a new pair!!!  The search will continue over the next couple of days!

Something I come back to quite regularly is a book by a guy called Gerry Duffy.  He wrote a book called 32 marathons in 32 days, a challenge he took up after his life went a different way than he planned.  The book is brilliant, and great to read from both a runner and non-runner point of view.  I follow him on twitter and his comments are always worth reading, well worth following  @32Marathons.  Gerry will be at start line of this years Dublin marathon and a video on what they did is worthwhile watching: