Running madness

Why get up at 5 in the morning to go running in the cold, wet and dark? Why run so much that some mornings you can barely walk downstairs because your muscles are so knackered and your joints are so stiff and painful? Why give up hours of your weekend to get in your long runs? All you can think about is when you can get your next training run in, how you can reorganise your week around your training schedule...

Yep, marathon training takes a certain type of insanity. And no, I don't always enjoy it - some mornings I would rather stay in bed (OK, most of them!). No, as I've blogged before, I am doing this for several reasons bigger than myself - firstly as a challenge to what I can push my body and mind to achieve, and secondly as a way to raise money for Cancer Research.

My aim is to finish - if you fancy sponsoring me to just get round and be alive at the end, then click the button at the top of the page.

I would like to finish in under 5 hours. I would really like to finish in under 4.5 hours.  If you fancy sponsoring me to hit these targets, then send me a message via blog comments or Facebook.

And if you want some evidence that I am doing what I say, look at my training history on Tribesports

Will I get there?

Six weeks until the Brighton Marathon, and I am asking myself this morning, can I actually do it? An 18km run first thing this morning (see http://tribesports.com/users/stevef1/training_sessions/165368) was good, apart from the last 5-6km uphill slog.  And I had hoped to do over 20km, but knew by the 15km mark that this was a pipe dream. It was in part down to that last 5km almost all uphill, and a fast middle 4km when meeting up with some running friends we did a short-ish circuit at faster than my usual pace, so I did wear myself out.

Nevertheless here I am at six weeks out from the big day, and I can manage a half  marathon, but not much more before my legs start to give out. Six weeks to get my body up to hacking it all the way around a full 26.2 miles. At this stage, I know I would struggle to complete that distance, and I have been training hard, 

But a lot can change in six weeks. And it is now that I begin to understand what so many marathon runners that have gone before me have discovered.  90% of the struggle is mental. If you don't believe you can do it, you never will. If you believe, with work, with effort, with pain, that you will make it then you have a more than fighting chance of finishing. Finishing well, that's down to the training and how your body is coping on the day, but finishing at all is mostly in the mind. 

Time for some mental calisthenics! 

Long Run

Finally got in the first real long run I've been needing to do for the last couple of weeks. Just under 25k, although the timing  was not great - probably due to a long uphill section for the last 5-6km, and the freezing rain and hail that nearly caused me to go hypothermic in the first 8km!

So the challenge of the next few weeks is to work on that pace and start doing longer runs (next one is aimed at 30k).

And pray for dryer, warmer weather!

Still fighting on

This has been a difficult couple of weeks. One day I am running strong and fast, the next I am hobbling along with foot pain or a trapped nerve in my shoulder, or gut rot. I am keeping up the speed and recovery runs, and increasing overall distance, but have fallen by the wayside on the long runs, which have, for the last couple of weeks at least, coincided with the other problems. Which, for marathon training is not great, because it is the long runs that build the endurance - the other runs just help with pace and strength.

You can see the last week's runs here