I had a midweek weigh-in this morning and scored a 197.7, that’s up point 7 on Saturday’s weigh-in.

I’m not overly concerned. I’ve been here before. The scale plays tricks on the mind and doesn’t really tell the whole story.

There are a number of physiological reasons for the added weight but I’m not going to examine those things now, or maybe ever, honestly, I think they’re probably an irrelevance.

My waistband tells me that I’m still on track as do my eyes when I look in the mirror.

I’m not making excuses and covering for a poor performance, like I said, I’ve been here before and I know this happens.

Anyway, I had a day off yesterday but today I got back to it.

This afternoon I knocked out another cross country run – my longest to date in terms of both time and distance.

I ran for an hour.

Now this is really the limit of what I want to be doing. Running for an hour takes its toll. At 40 years old I get aches and pains where I didn’t at 20 or even 30. A run of this duration is punishing for my feet and my knees.

As I said before, 40 to 50 minutes is a much more comfortable upper limit for duration but I was keen to see what I could achieve if I pushed the envelope. Bizarrely I could have gone on beyond the hour but I chose to end it so as not to overdo it or sustain an injury.

Although it seems counterproductive I’ve consumed a few more calories than usual this evening to compensate for the extra exertion. I don’t want my metabolism to start shutting down thinking that my body is being starved.

Now that I’ve broken the pain barrier with the running I want to limit the runs to 3 per week. I want some extra capacity for when I need to break a plateau.

I have plans to do some body weight exercises on the days in between and I’ve already set up another site to monitor that aspect. I plan on starting the BW exercises next week.