In a brief 6-week break before the winter season starts (consisting mainly of sitting on the sofa, watching the West-Wing and eating crème brûlée or an entire bag of prawn crackers) it’s time to get back into the swing of things.

Things have definitely slid since the summer, but it’s made to feel worse by the onset of winter training. Before this year, I had never given a thought to how track-training might change with the seasons; I thought I just found it harder at the start, and then it got easier as I got fitter. Not so. My first track session at New River totalled 1600m. The last was just 300m.

So although we are getting ‘gently’ back into it, training this week has felt tough. Back to longer sprints on the track and on the hills, and more of them. With many months until the next race, this is perhaps the most difficult period of the training calendar- nothing imminent to focus on or to lift the spirits; and nothing but dark nights and freezing mornings ahead.

At the start of the break, it felt odd not to train. I had re-assessed my initial pledge to myself: that I would train for at least the 8 months up until the European Champs, and then see if I still wanted to do it. Towards the end of the season, during warm and bright evening sessions with just a few short and speedy sprints- I wondered why I would even question doing another year of this.

But now, in the cold, wet days of grim training, and hovering to the side, wanting to vomit… it’s a lot harder.

The 2016 season in numbers:

162 training hours
15 days of competition
60 events entered
Power Of 10