With less than a week to go before training starts Mum has declared her training plan complete.  I did briefly get my jaws on the planner but Mum tricked it off me by dumping the whole pot full of emergency training treats onto the floor in one go.  She also went very pale so I licked her a lot and wagged my tail, which obviously made everything fine.  It's not a complete loss because while Mum's been jealously guarding the precious plan I've repeatedly stolen her favourite boots with the soft furry bits inside which feel soooo good when I shove my nose inside them for a good old chew. I'm still not entirely sure what this marathon thing involves.  Mum is very pleased with her plan, it's covered in post it notes - which I did manage to steal half a pack of - and is colour coded and incredibly neat.  If running a marathon involves lots of neat writing, post it notes and colour coding I am sure Mum will have no problems.  Mum has also stock piled a...

Despite protestations to the contrary, Mum has decided to run another marathon in the spring.  Mum apparently wasn't going to do a marathon next spring, in fact she agreed so with Dad, but then her friends all signed up for marathons and she got marathon envy.  Mum's marathon last year wasn't a complete success.  It was OK, she says, and she enjoyed it and was relatively pleased with her time, but secretly Mum was quite disappointed.  Apparently Mum was "a bit of a twat", whatever that is, and injured herself trying to run on frozen slush, and she missed quite a bit of training.  Mum had to run the marathon a bit slower than she'd have liked, and this is niggling at her, a lot.  Mum thinks she could run a marathon faster than she did last year, and she'd like to have another go.   Which brought her back to the deal with Dad, either a puppy or a spring marathon.  Dad apparently doesn't object to the marathon as such, but he does object ...