Week 8 of my marathon training plan and I realise I haven’t written much about the nitty-gritty of how many miles I’ve been clocking up for a while. Rest assured the mileage has been climbing and the weeks have been ticked off. It’s only this week, however, that my distance heads into the unknown.

The furthest I’ve ever run is 13.1 miles and that was during the Great Eastern Run half marathon back in October. The longest I’ve run since then was the 12 miles I ran last Saturday but this Saturday I will be heading into the unknown and running 14 miles in one go.

This is quite a milestone as it marks the end of me being able to say to myself ‘It’s fine – you can do it, you’ve done it before.’ The reassuring familiarity of the numbers on the training plan ends this week. The friendly 8s, 10s and 12s have gone and will be replaced by daunting 14s, 16s and 18s.

On the plus side (or another negative depending on how you look at it), there are only six weeks of big mileage weeks to before I start to taper. Tapering is something I think I’ll be good at – basically it means reducing mileage. It is usually accompanied by free reign to continue eating as though you were still training – I think I could definately be good at that.

One thing I learnt this week is that drinking five pints of beer the night before your long run doesn’t count as carb-loading and doesn’t make your run any easier.