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I've got a 15 mile fell race in a few weeks time and it has been praying on my mind that, although I have some good hill running fitness, I've not run more than about ten for a month or so.

This is partially because I'm babying my current good form by restricting my weekly miles to about 30 in total and so if I run four times a week (one of which is usually ten) it's unlikely that I'll run any of the others short enough to allow another long run.

I skipped the club run on Tuesday night because I had felt a cold coming on (and the foul weather didn't encourage me) and decided to do an easy six on Wednesday morning instead if I felt okay. So Wednesday morning I got up and downed a pint of water and left the house onto the wet streets.

As seems to be usual for me at the moment, I felt better than I expected and followed my usual route down to the coast and along the gravel path to the boatyard leaping over the puddles and enjoying the views of the river.

I reached the boatyard which is three miles from home and felt good enough to push on to the next boatyard half a mile further on. As it's an out-and-back route every half a mile I add on adds a mile to the total for the run and it becomes almost a dare with myself to see how far I can push the out part of the run knowing that the end of the back part will become tougher.

So I made it to 3.5 miles and felt fine so crossed the river bridge and headed up the long climb up the hill to the windmill at Bursledon. The hill training had worked well and so I reached the top of the hill feeling good and turned off down the other side wondering how far I was willing to risk turning the second-half of the run into a painful slog.

I made it to six and then six and half feeling relatively fresh but at seven I decided that if I wanted to get up to 15 miles then I'd be better getting back feeling good and do and extra mile there if I wanted to.

The return journey went well and it was only really when I reached about 13 miles that I started to notice that I had to concentrate to keep my speed up because otherwise my pace would drop off - skipping slow songs on the ipod seemed to help the motivation too.

I took a roundabout route back home to take the mile up to 15 but didn't quite manage the full 15 by the time I got back and decided that running up and down the road until the figure on my pedometer read 15 wasn't really worth it.

So 14.5 miles 2hr 2min.