I'm officially at the half way point for training and whilst not everything is going to plan, Im still very happy with my progress and it appears to be a lot better than previous training for half marathons that Ive done in the past. A few tweaks here and there to my training and I think I'll be well on my way to a good half!

Monday
A tough session in the pool which consisted of a few drills with the kickboard and pullbouy and then a 15 minute continuous swim of front crawl only. I wouldn't say Im bad at front crawl but it's not my strongest stroke. I struggle a lot with my stamina and breathing, so I knew that 15 minutes of continuous front crawl would be tough on me.

I think I did fairly well, other than a couple of 10 second stops here and there I managed to swim the full 15 minutes.

Tuesday
Headed out with Jane and the dog for 3 miles - I needed to be ready and out of the house a little earlier than usual so I cut my run down a little shorter than a typical Tuesday. it was so cold and slippy out on the roads too!

Thursday
Headed out for a short 3 mile run in my new lightweight shoes. Needless to say they need some getting used to. They felt OK to start, then the outer part on just one of my feet got really sore, it did ease off towards the end of my run but my feet need to get used to the shoes for sure.
Saturday
We got ourselves to parkrun on Saturday, managed to get us there on time compared to last time. It was a good run, very cold though! Had a fast 1st mile but really struggled on the hills out on the course, there's a really long hill after about a mile in. There are zero hills in the area that we live in so we never get to really run them unless we travel somewhere to do it.

Sunday
Long Run Day! Phillip and I had agreed to go into the City for a run to get in some hill training since we both struggle with hills.  We had originally agreed to run a hill loop up through the park in the city which is a 0.6 mile loop up and back round to the bottom and do about 6 miles in total for my long run this week.
After 2 loops, I seriously wanted to give up and was cursing Phillip for the idea. I kept going regardless as I knew I had to get in at least 6 miles. I did 9 loops of the park hill before we decided to run around the city to finish up 6.. which then ended up turning into me just deciding to do 9 miles to stay on plan!

I finished feeling pretty stoked with myself after 9 hill loops and 9 miles total.

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Overall it's been a pretty good week and topped off with my 9 miler this past Sunday. I need to get some more runs in with my lighter weight shoes to get used to them and I'll probably attempt an interval/speed run sometime this week as they only end up being about 2 miles in total(I take walk breaks instead of jog breaks as I die on intervals! xD).

This weekend will be a 9-10 miler, Im way ahead of schedule in terms of mileage so I can afford to have a couple of shorter weeks. I have a race on the 5th February too for London Winter Run so I'll only be doing a 10k distance for my 'long run' that week.

Also - Im linking up with Courtney from Eat Pray Run DC to share our training diaries with other runners! So check out the linkup on her blog! :) Also, if you want to catch up on my other training diaries, you can find them all HERE.

Question: Do you incorporate hill training into your schedule?