I’ve been on a recovery week this week for training, although I missed yesterday’s run because of a migraine that came on Wednesday afternoon and has had a long tail. I’m still not feeling great but just have a short session of intervals tomorrow which I should be able to get done. Next week is the big one and then I’m on taper —yay! I should be able to get through one more week without injuring myself. Then I just need to avoid any viruses until the race.

This weekend we are heading down to Point Lonsdale. The weather looks like it’s going to be dreadful, but we are going down for my parents 60th wedding anniversary. It will be all the siblings, neices and nephews plus some of my aunties and uncles so should be fun. I’ve made Chicken and Chickpea Stew with Chorizo for add to the potluck dinner tomorrow night. I haven’t made it before but it looks great and seems to be tasty. You fry up the chorizo and add it last so that will add even more flavour.

I also have a batch of No Bake Chocolate Pretzel Peanut Butter Squares which a so yummy and very moreish, but not a cheap recipe to make. I only used 1 cup of icing sugar because 1.5 cups seemed like a lot and I usually find that recipes from the US are too sweet. They were plenty sweet enough.

In other news I did my first test from the Built to Move book. I first got my hands on the book a few years ago and worked my way through almost all the chapters but have fallen off some of the wagon since then. Each chapter has a test and then offers ways to improve your score on the test. I’ve decided to rework through each chapter again and the first chapter is the Sit to Stand test. Which involves standing with legs crossed and sitting down on the floor cross legged then getting back up to a stand. You start with ten points and take a point of for every hand or knee touch you need to get up and down. Last time I tried it was before I had my stress fracture and I knew I’d lost a bit of strength and mobility through that process which I’ve been gradually building back up. I did the test last week and managed a 9 which is the same as last time I took the test. I just needed to put one hand on the ground to get myself back up to standing. I don’t think I was a close to 10 as last time I tested, but hopefully I’ll get there.

I enjoy reading Chris Arnadale Walks the World. He’s back in Australia and he had another interesting post: Riding the Aussie Dog. Again and What Makes Australia Australia. I broadly agree with his conclusions apart from his opinion of Alice Springs, although that is largely due to the fact that we visited to see the sights and not the bus station. Anyway that has inspired me to do a recap of our family Central Australian Roadtrip on my blog … but time has got away from me, so realistically I think that will have to wait until we are home and I’ve recapped our upcoming Europe trip.

And a few more things:

• A helpful post: Dealing with Dickovers
• Do You Still Look at the Stars (long read)