Sunday past (August 27th) was my target day to complete the 53km Bluestack Way in a Day. Although my training plan has been a bit hit and miss over the 12 weeks I had an excellent plan for the final lead-in week. Sunday and Monday saw me walk 20km each day back to back followed by a rest day Tuesday and early morning 5k walks Wednesday and Thursday with Friday and Saturday as rest days. I was in bed every night at 930pm with the aim to be settled to sleep by 10pm.

All that went exactly to plan but the weather refused to play ball. All week Sunday’s forecast stubbornly refused to waiver from heavy rain between 7am and 3pm. All week I flip-flopped from yes or no to the extent I was still 50/50 on Saturday morning. Late that afternoon though I finally made the call to delay by one week.

Living in Ireland I’m well used to rain. My training has seen plenty of wet days and I’m not that foolish not to expect some rain at this time of year but somehow trudging for anywhere between 10-14 hours soaking wet didn’t appeal. This will be a tough enough challenge without that! Plus the long range weather forecast was showing Sunday 3rd September to be near perfect.

Now it’s Tuesday, I didn’t walk either Sunday* or Monday but I did get to bed reasonably early last night and I was out before dawn for a 5K walk before work this morning. The plan is 2 more days of that, back to early nights for the week and rest again Friday and Saturday. I need to get my head back in the zone I was in last week and be 100% focused on this weekend being the final option. With rapidly decreasing day length it pretty much is! I had built in the option of a one week delay from the very beginning but as the title of this post says this is it!

Thankfully this week the weather forecast is also holding steady at a fairly good day.

*my decision to postpone was fully justified by a wet, cold and generally horrible day all the way until mid afternoon.

I will probably post up a link to a Garmin Live Track on Sunday in case anyone is struggling for a way to pass a Sunday afternoon.