My weather app told me it was going to be sunny this afternoon, so I've waited all morning. It's still not sunny. Anyway, we're on to week 12 of the Paris marathon training block and that is pretty much it now. So it's time for a look back at how the training block has gone. We'll talk a little bit about the training I've done this week including another good park running on Saturday and of course we'll have a look ahead to what we might be able to achieve, what we might be looking for in the Paris marathon in just a few days' time. So the final week of training saw me bring the mileage down from 125 last week to 100k this week. That's just over 60 miles for the week. Monday was a rest day. First rest day in ages I seem to have had. Tuesday was a very easy day which leaves Wednesday as our final Paris marathon training session on Zwift and it was 90 seconds on, 90 seconds off. Last real hard session of the training block. Done. By the way, Wednesday was also Victoria's 50th birthday. So just for fun, we went out in the morning and we did a 50 minute run exactly 50 minutes for Victoria's 50th birthday. If you want to check out any of my training sessions, they are all on-strawvers. All of my runs are documented on-strawvers so go and have a look there. The interval sessions on Zwift are all live streamed so you can go and watch them back on YouTube if you so desire. Now as well as Wednesday being a double run day so what's the first day in Friday? Thursday Friday were a dead easy, nice relaxed runs which brings us to Saturday and we wanted to go and try what is purportedly the fastest park run in the UK. So the ranking list of fastest to slowest park runs is published by Tim Gross. Now you might know Tim from his shoe review videos on his YouTube channel but what you might not know is Tim is a better data scientist and is the creator of the power of 10 website and the run Britain rankings data. So he's in charge of all that. He knows his data back to front and he created an algorithm to rank all the park runs by fastest to slowest. Now I'll find a link somewhere to link that down below but suffice to say the latest version of that list has Victoria Dock park run as the fastest. So Victoria and myself and our two children, Elsa and Ellis and our friend Sarah went through Victoria Dock park run on Saturday and I managed to do fairly well even though it was quite windy 1847 for my park run in sixth place I think I came so that's pretty good but my assessment was that it's definitely not the fastest. There's lots of twists and turns in it and like I say it was really windy on the day we did it and a couple of 10 mile runs finished off the week one on Saturday night on Zwift and one on Sunday morning on the sea front bringing the week to a close on just over 100 kilometres and that leaves just one more week of taper before the marathon itself and that's the week I'm running right now I'm recording this on Wednesday just out for a short 8K overall. I have to say I think the training blocks gone really really well. One blip in the middle so that was kind of partly to do with work and partly to do with illness. I think it was something like week five end of January anyway so I was down in Cornwall and we were live streaming the archipotrition race and just after that I got very ill as well I say very ill you know I had man flu and I had to take a few days off running I was very tired from live streaming for a whole weekend so I was ill for about four or five days however incredibly at the end of that week of illness I managed to pull out a 39 55 10K so it kind of been all bad other than that everything's gone pretty much to plan managed to increase the mileage from a steady 100K a week in the early part of the block to a maximum of I think it was about 97 miles so 155K was my top week and then gradually brought it down since then and you can see because of the number of interval sessions I've done in this block more training in zones four and five my VO2 max has increased from January when it was 55 now 57 granted it's not a huge increase and it is only an estimate from my Garmin watch but it is an increase nonetheless now you know I love my spreadsheet and so I've created this one which is a comparison between my only other sub three marathon which was good wood in 2020 with this marathon training block attempting a sub three for Paris 2023 and you can see quite a lot of interesting comparisons between the two training blocks so you can see for good wood I actually did more mileage so at least 1500 a little bit more than 1500 kilometers of mileage in about 150 hours worth of running whereas for the Paris training block I've only done less than 1400 kilometers about 100 miles worth of difference in the two and 130 hours of running and you can see the average training paces are about the same as well there's really not much difference between the two marginally faster for good wood but that's overall wait till we get to intensity you see although I did more mileage for the good wood training block I've done more time in zones four and five for my Paris marathon training block six percent of my time for good wood we spend in zones four and five as opposed to eight percent of my time over the Paris marathon training period and perhaps that's why my VO2 max has increased over this training period so that's what the physical training has looked like but as we know from talking to Stuart Mills physical training is only a small part of your potential for success in a marathon Stuart would want me to talk about how I'm feeling about it all how much do I want this and I have to say talking to Stuart really made me think about that and it did make me realise that I do want it I really really want to try and break three hours and I'm going to go for it in a really positive way if you look at the video I did at the very start of this training block I'm talking about how negative I feel I'm talking about a little bit of worry ahead of the training block that I'm fat that I'm not fit that I'm slow and I said that I need you guys to encourage me and help me along and you've done that all the messages I've received I'm really grateful for you've really been supportive of this training series and my training efforts and a massive thanks to Stuart as well for jumping in there and just giving me some advice and helping me along a bit the last month or so because I do feel a lot more positive now about how this training block has gone and what I may be able to achieve in Paris now there are obviously no guarantees about anything I have to perform on the day and I have to have the right mindset to perform on the day I just need to get the job done I just need to be confident in myself get on that start line and say I am going to do this remember those three questions that Stuart posed to me a few weeks ago what do you want to do why do you want to do it and how much do you want it absolutely how much because that's the thing that will separate you from somebody who is going to perform on the day from somebody who's going to achieve their goal you have to absolutely want it and that is definitely something I've struggled with how much do I really want it there are other things in life I'm interested in lots of other things other than running and how much time am I prepared to put in to training for a sub three marathon well after these last 12 weeks I think I do want it enough to go out there and say let's go and get this so thank you to everyone who's commented on the videos offered messages of support or even just watch the Paris marathon training video series good luck with whatever marathon you're training for I know there are a lot of marathons coming up in the spring so we've got Manchester Boston London Paris plenty of others going on good luck in whichever one you're targeting let me know in the comments down below which one you are targeting if you've missed any of the Paris marathon training series videos click that link right there and you'll be taken to the playlist otherwise thank you very much for watching we will see you next time this is the last episode of the Paris marathon training series but we'll see for another series next time take care bye