Did my first practice lab yesterday. I used a topology from INE as my rack is cabled that way anyway. Carved up the different routing protocols on paper and then began configuring. The first thing I came to realize is that I am very slow at the moment at completing labs, it took me the best part of 8 hours to do a simple lab with 7 routers and 4 switches including troubleshooting when I mis-configured it.
WOW!
Hopefully this will change over time with the more I practice.