Miles on legs

Tuesday night is interval training night, so I head off down the path of my 1-mile circuit at a fair pace - and only get a couple of hundred yards before, at the bottom of the hill, I come across where the bridge taking a stream (the Mad Brook!) under the path had become blocked, the stream was overflowing, and the path was under water. Slowly picking my way through the driest mud was obviously going to play havoc with my speed work (not to mention trainers that had been new and shiny only 3 weeks ago) so I aborted the interval training for tonight, and just ran about 3 miles. Felt OK during the run, but my right hamstring seemed to tighten up later, so my intention to add an extra midweek run went by the board, and Thursday I just satisfied myself with a game of football.
On to Saturday, and a nice sunny day for a 4 mile run through the town park, and I felt good about it - late on, trotting along the Silkin Way, I felt as if I could keep this up for ever. Perhaps I wasn't pushing the pace enough - certainly, the group of half-a-dozen women (ranging from young to half my age) whom I met coming in the opposite direction seemed to be going faster than I was.
Sunday, and my longest run yet. 8 miles to Shifnal and back. Cutting through the Hem on my route out I came across the first obstacle - overnight hail had left a 30 yard stretch of the road completely flooded from side to side. The only way past was to climb onto the muddy grass verge, and fight my way through the brambles, not emerging until I had been bloodied! However, it was nice to be out in the sun again - until I turned around at the roundabout at Shifnal, and headed back - into a wind that was quite strong (I didn't feel that on the way out!) and rather icy. Back at the turnoff for the Hem, and I obviously can't go back that way (not that I'd intended to anyway - I needed to go the long way back to make up the mileage that I needed) so I carry on along the road to Halesfield. Now, from Shifnal to the Hem there is a footpath (albeit, sometimes rather narrow) but this ends at the Hem. So I have the option of running in the road - and there's a fair amount of fast-moving traffic - or running on the verge, which is rough and hummocky, with the occasional mole-hill. I end up running in the road until a car comes, and then leaping up onto the verge and plodding along through a very resistant medium. It's a bit like the obstacle course in "An Officer and a Gentleman" where you have to run through a field of car tyres. I've never been gladder to get to the corner by Link 51, where the footpath resumes. Good old civilization! By now, with the extra effort of leaping through the clods on the verge, I'm starting to feel the pain, and the last couple of miles I'm digging deep. Perhaps unsurprising for my longest run yet, but it does underline that I need to up my training mileage to encompass at least one half-marathon distance run.
A quick check back over my training diary and I see that I haven't yet run as far as the weekly mileage required by my training schedule - once I have been only 1 mile short, and twice only 2 miles, but never the full mileage. That's something that needs to be addressed!
A final point about my Delamere Dash time - I plugged this in to the Lucozade Sport Running Coach, and this gave me a predicted half-marathon time of under 1 hour 56. Some improvement still to be made!