Oh yeah, TravelJug, you're right about the cutting down on drinking and stopping smoking lark. Just I love the pub too much and fags are really moreish.
By the way, where does everyone train? I generally road run a few times a week, and gym maybe 3 or 4. I go to my local JJB gym, it's nice and new, has every machine you could possibly want, pool, jacuzzis and a large steam room. When I go to the gym I generally try and start lifting some weights. I don't have a gym partner, so I used fixed weights. As much as I'd love to be disciplined in the gym, I fail, so rather than working on legs one day, chest the other, arms the next for example, I just blitz myself on every major muscle group. Then I do about between 30 mins cardio, on this weird machine that is like a treadmill but has two belts and they go up and down (it simulates hiking, apparently, and burns calories twice as fast as a treadmill, apparently), rowing or normal treadmill. Nothing severe, just keep myself at a nice pace.
If I'm hungry, banana before and/or after. Before, during and after I'm training I hydrate on a lucozade sport mix from Boots, even though I'm not even sure if hydrates better than water. 500ml over the course of the session, including before and afer does the job, sometimes with more water if I'm thirsty.
I'm probably going to knock the lucozade sport in the head as I reckon it's bollocks. What is also bollocks is the amount of water people are told to drink these days. 2.5 litres normally, rising to 4-5 litres when training is a lot of water. It makes me laugh, because the only place in any medical journal where this is stated is in a BMJ article from 1945 (before the golden age of medicine) where we are recommended to drink a ml of water for every calorie, so 2500 cals is 2.5L water. Thing is, straight after that, we are informed that the majority of this is took in as the food we eat.