Well that was further than I had planned to run! A whopping 36km run and I am just at the end of week 2 of my training plan. My time: 3 hours. So if I go 10% faster I should get my target marathon time of 3 hours… and I still have 13 weeks to prepare 
I ran from High Street Kensington, down to Battersea and then along the North bank of the Thames to Chiswick Bridge (near Kew Gardens) - that was about 16km and took 1:17. I came back along the South bank, all the way to the end of Battersea Park, then over the river, up Sloan Street and through Hyde Park to home. I have used GPS Visualizer to overlay the GPS data from my Timex Watch onto a Google Map… this has allowed me to create a map of my route.
The first half of the run was fine and I got a respectable half marathon time of 1:35. My legs then started to hurt as I went on… the ache was in my hamstrings whereas last week it had mainly been in my quads.
At around the 25km point I was forced to leave the river bank and I got a bit lost… this is when my pace dropped as I zig-zagged around trying to get back to the river bank. When I found the Thames again I treated myself to a giant Snickers Bar… I walked as I devoured it and then set off on the final leg with an imperceptible bounce in my stride.
As I crossed back over the river, my legs were aching a lot. I had to negotiate the streets of Knightsbridge on my way to Hyde Park… not that much fun. I wander what all the shoppers thought as I lurched past them with a pained look on my face.
When I got home the sense of achievement just about counteracted my sore legs. The first thing I did was down two glasses of milk. I stiffened up pretty quickly so I tried to stretch as best I could. All in all I felt better than I had done last week and I had gone 11km further. The route was much better, no tourist or pigeons and beautiful views of the Thames. I also took a bottle of isotonic drink which I sipped continuously throughout the run… it made all the difference. It wasn’t all good though… my nipples have almost been chaffed raw by the rubbing of my dry-fit top… remind me to Vaseline them next week!
In other news, I was very sad to hear that the Thames Whale died during the rescue operation.
good stuff on that long run! and great map too. I really need to get that equipment for mapping runs. Sorry to hear about the whale dying and keep up the good solid work. The snickers sentence was a good and tasty inclusion.
FYI, for future reference: if you want to draw a map from your Timex data without getting the “dotted line” look due to GPS outages, you can force GPS Visualizer to connect line segments by choosing “Connect segments = yes” in the map form. That should save you some rigamarole.