Dust down your favourite Bruce Buffer suit, clear out the throat because Ladies & Gentlemen, Boys & Girls, it’s TIME! 25 weeks of training in the light-heavyweight division (thankfully recent gains didn’t push me into heavyweight) for the Virgin Money London Marathon 2018. If you’ve done a patented Buffer spin at the end, please don’t blow out your knee like Bruce did.
Marathon Planning
How do you plan a marathon retirement tour? If I were a long standing band then we’d be looking at nationwide tour of every small & large venue around, finishing with multiple nights at Wembley Arena.
Alas marathon retirement is a different beast. I’ve a simple goal for this race, train well enough to do myself justice. Train well enough within the confines of a good family life, don’t be that person (and as runners we all know at least one), who puts their running goals above all else in life. I’d like to enjoy these next 25 weeks. These 75 runs, 25 visits to the gym, 25 visits to the swimming pool or something. Life has never been busier, now I’m throwing a marathon training plan into the mix. If life was already a case of spinning plates, then I’ve just sat myself on a unicycle whilst trying to keep all those plates going round & around.
You could suggest I need to be a little bit selfish. I’d content that I just need to be a bit clever. My work might take me away frequently, but I also work from home a fair amount. Perhaps it is a case of making sure I have fresh kit in my overnight bag, packing the swimming shorts if the hotel has a pool, packing the yoga mat. If I’m working from home, why not log on early, away from distractions & get work done, then run at lunchtime? If I’m on a Callum run to Matilda, why not go for a swim in London, acquaint myself with the athletics track at Mile End, or play some squash?
Clever & resourceful, that might just deliver a marathon. Either way I’ll be completing 42.2km at the end of April then hanging up the marathon boots & enjoying more sensible distances.
The Cross Training
My multicoloured plan is based loosely on the Hal Higdon 3 runs a week mantra. Some weeks have 3, some 4, but after 7 years of running, I know that any more running than that just leads to injuries & time off. I once attempted a run streak, at the end of 2013, doing myself far more harm than good.
The plan also includes a couple of cross training sessions per week. These can be whatever they need to be, the idea is that it is a change from the norm. The gym membership through work was acquired for this reason, another means to an end. Sadly the class list isn’t as exhaustive or as full as when I lived in MK & was a Pure Gym member, but when you leave the city of the future, the neon lights & the monorail, you have to make sacrifices.
Week one of the plan & I found myself at the Stansted 1life gym. My issue with gyms is that they are dull, demotivational, soulless places, pumping out shite music & shite, subtitled TV. I settled on a rowing machine & tried to block the world out, putting myself through 3000m, I think the furthest I’d ever done, including when I used to have one in the garage. I then wandered a circuit of the weight machines, viewing all of them with an air of suspicion & confusion. Many aren’t obvious to me, so I stuck to the ones I could work out, doing some work on my hip flexors, quads & glutes, all things on me that defer their workload to my calves when running.
To finish, the recumbent bike for a bit. The workout wasn’t going to win any Shaun T awards for intensity, but it was a start. It was followed later in the week by something completely different.
In our utility room there is a treadmill, a fridge freezer, a washing machine, shelving. None of these are much use for cross training. There is also a standing punchbag as well. Woody is using it less, but I felt it might be worth incorporating into some of my training. So I guessed at the size of my hands & ordered some kit off of Amazon. With the Klaxons filling the room, I took umbrage with the bag. I think I did about 20-25 minutes, throwing more punches in that time than cumulatively over nearly 35 years. The utility room is ideal for this (and less than ideal for running) as it is compact, a little sweat box. I probably looked ridiculous, but it was a nice variation.
Got the runs
I suppose we should talk about the running. Three runs in one week would be quite the stretch after 7 weeks of limiting myself to parkrun. Only the week prior had included a second run, nothing had been of any distance during that time.
This was the thinking behind a 25 week plan, I would essentially be starting from scratch again. My goal is to get up to half marathon distance by Xmas, giving me a nice platform to start 2018 from.
Week 1 was relatively simple, two 40 minute runs, one 60 minute run, at a nominal 10 minute mile pace. Quite why, when I run everything in kilometres I have these weird imperial values I’m not sure, I should really change them over to clicks, but by using 10 minutes as a guide they do work quite nicely.
The first run would be in Leicester, where I hadn’t realised sunrise would be a little later as we were a little bit more northern. The headtorch would need to be found for future weeks. I headed from the travel tavern towards the big park in Braunstone, then stuck to the pavements, winging it a bit & eventually finding I was going the right way. The loop worked perfectly, just over 7km, back to the hotel in time for a shower & a visit to the breakfast buffet before work.
Working from home later in the week meant I could stay local & return to a route that I’ve run, or the reverse of more times than is probably healthy. My Stansted loop is another nice 7km route, mixing country lanes with pavement alongside the main road in the town. It has five crossings so time and rhythm can be compromised, but it worked alright for me. Two runs into the week & I felt alright.
Sunday would be more of a challenge. 60 minutes, 10 kilometres, a distance & duration I’d not entertained since the Manuden debacle. This would be a small, but significant monkey off my back. I’d purposefully aimed for the hour in the first week, no messing around with 8km or 9km, just get up to ten, I have the miles & experience in my legs after all.
Sometimes you need a few contributing factors to make everything click nicely into place. Sunday morning greeted us with beautiful sunshine, whereas the Saturday had been dank & grim, Sunday was offering a chance to don the sunglasses, temperatures not too cold, neither too hot, a bit of wind when exposed. The kind of weather that makes you actually want to get out for a run.
I had thought about doing the same loop as earlier in the week, throwing in a bit extra to make up the distance. I started out north & opted to carry on north, before taking the road to Ugley & Elsenham. There wasn’t too much traffic around, so the road was easily negotiated. One thing that was noticeable straight away was my pace. I start slowly & get into a rhythm, that’s how it has worked for some time. Yet on this occasion my first click was under six minutes. Strange, I put this down to the downhill nature. The second was a little bit quicker still. I eventually settled into a slightly slower rhythm, but this was a morning where everything just worked.
It wasn’t until I climbed back from the bottom of Stansted that my pace slower, understandable given both the climb & the fact I was stretching myself. Just over the hour for just over 10km, that’ll do nicely.
As runs go, I couldn’t have asked for a better one to finish off my first week back. The conditions were so good that I persuaded Georgia (didn’t need much persuasion to be fair) to head out after me.
Castle Park parkrun
A few weeks have passed since we went live in Bishop’s Stortford, the event is settling into the new surroundings nicely. It was time to take the reins once more, having rarely suffered bad weather when Run Directing before, I had the short straw on this occasion & was sending George across to a supermarket to get some bin liners for volunteers just in case the weather really did turn.
I felt out of sorts for a lot of the morning. Georgia had been RD the week before & between us, neither of us had gone through all of the kit in the boot, we’d taken out the laptop, radios etc, but the vast majority had stayed in the Volvo for the week. As the rain came down early on Saturday morning, I rifled through the kit to send teams out to do setup. I just didn’t feel comfortable, everything was a bit frayed, a bit messy. A lesson for both myself & George, not to be complacent, we hadn’t realised just how everything had been packed away. We had one of the more testing weeks as Event Directors, dealing with some stuff behind the scenes that made having two of us very useful.
The setup being a bit muddled did have a beneficial impact, we spent Sunday, post run finding new kit boxes as the sprawling nature of our kit now that we’re sans storage isn’t helping any of our Run Directors.
Once I screwed my head back on the morning ran well. We have a number of new Run Directors that have joined the team, with one shadowing me & others taking on roles around the finish area. It meant we had more eyes around the funnel than usual & could monitor a slight change to the finish to see how that was working.
The rain didn’t deter that many, a healthy 267 participants, a size that feels natural for the event as we approach what is likely a spike in the new year. Six weeks on & the event could have been in the park for a couple of years, there is a settled nature to it.
Quite the clean up & drying exercise after the event though! Suddenly having over 100 football cones felt a bit extravagant!
The Eat
The first night of marathon training involved a call from me in Leicester to Georgia back home. “Obviously my step count is important, it means I’m not sedentary, so it makes sense that I walk to the golden arches for dinner?” George wasn’t buying any of it, I should go to Aldi instead & get some more healthy, run fuelling stuff instead. At least the end of the week concluded with a trip to Five Guys!
On Thursday I had a flying visit to Frankfurt for a meeting. This gave my colleague & I an extended period in the airport between landing & being picked up by our Germany based colleague before the customer meeting. This meant I could indulge in some excellent Veal Wienserschnitzel.
The Conclusion
A week that worked as a perfect reintroduction to running. I’ve many more runs ahead, more distance & with time, some speed work, but this incremental build was exactly what I needed after an extended break.
24 weeks to go……
Well, 22 & a bit weeks after I finally got round to publishing this!!!!
Run for the Eat 