Two weeks & Running

I've been going extra extra gung-ho on the exercise the last few months or so . This is due to a lot of reasons but mainly I need to get my weight down quickly for my health. I've been doing running races every year since 2002 but the last two weeks I had the bright idea to do two 5k (3 mile) races back to back. My total mileage including the race since last Sunday is 10 miles and this doesn't include my usual time I clocked at the gym and doing yoga this week. I've just got a few more weeks to keep this routine up (if I don't pass out first) and then I've got trekking in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to look forward to in October as well. 4-5 hours of hiking a day in the high mountains of North Africa will be definitely a challenge. So, keep your fingers crossed and end of November/December I should hopefully have dropped at least a little bit of weight.

The races these last two weeks were the same distance but two completely different worlds. The first one was the London Peace Run through Greenwich Park. About 100 people participated, 80 of them professional runners. Mentally I found this one horrible because half the people darted way ahead at the start, the heat was draining and the difficulty of the hills were unexpected. My time was crap but James did it with me and that made it a lot more worthwhile. Here are some pics of James and I at the end of the race:

The second one, the Hydro Active Women's Challenge was quite humorous due to the amount of people involved. 20,000 runners just in London participate every year to do a little 3 mile race and professional runners come from all over the world to run as well. Its an absolutely huge event and highlights are even shown on the 5 o'clock news. You also get a great goodie bag and medal at the end full of t-shirts, organic food and samples galore of everything you could imagine. I swear people do it more for the stuff at the end than the actual challenge of the race. My time was a lot better than the Peace Run cause the route was easier. In the end I managed to do it in about 34:00 which is a personal best for me (My very first 5k I did it in about 46 min). You can see from the sheer amount of people in the pic below how popular this run is. Also, although the expression of my face at the end makes me looks out of it, I was just glad to get these darn races over with.