Man vs. Bike

Ended up clocking over 50km last week. This comprised of 10km before work on Tuesday, 8km on Wednesday and 5km on Thursday, all done at around 13.5km/h pace. I then did another 10km in under 45 minutes on Friday morning – I even got it on the iPod this time, but I ended up doing an 18km/h sprint at the end as the iPod distance wasn’t tying up with the one on the treadmill.

I finished the week with a big 23km run in the gym on Sunday. I’d rather be running outside but the plan was to see how I could do over a long distance at the planned marathon pace of 12km/h. I also bumped into a friend, Michelle, who I hadn’t seen in a while, and ended up chatting to her for about 20 minutes whilst running. I heard somewhere that you can tell you’re running at a comfortable pace if you’re able hold a conversation with someone so that was reassuring. It ended up being a fairly hard run but I managed to hold the pace fine and, although I was shattered by the end, I wasn’t desperate to stop and I probably could have kept this pace up over a longer distance.

The weathers been good this week, so i’ve ditched the gym to do a series of runs around the Devil’s Punchbowl during lunch. I’ve got a decent longer route of around 5 miles that takes about 40 minutes – which is pretty much the same time it used to take me to mountainbike it. On Tuesday I got to find out whether it was faster to get round my foot or by bike as started off on my run from the office about the same time as Nat, Mike and Jason where heading out on their bikes. The bikes were a lot faster on the flat and on the descent but on foot was a lot faster on the uphill so I ended up getting round slightly faster. They had to stop for a few minutes when Mike broke his chain, and I started off a few minutes after them so its not really a fair test, plus i’m sure they could get round a lot faster if they tried so i won’t get too cocky. Be fun to set off at the same time and see what happens though.

Charity Update

The fundraising is going really well – now up to £700 – so we’re already past the halfway point. I’ve been completely taken aback at how generous everyone has been with the donation. When I signed up to Childhood First I figured i’d put in the deposit of £250 myself, and estimated that i’d have to find another 100 people at a tenner each to make up the remaining thousand. Finding 100 people would be tough, but I thought probably achievable. Some people would give a bit more, some people wouldn’t chose to give, but overall £10 seemed a pretty good bet.

Based on this estimate I was expecting to have had to go to around 45 people to get to the current  total of £450. The reality has been that it has only took 4(!?!) donations to get there.

Since the last update one of my best friends – Anthony – has put £50 in… thats a whole pile of Yen! He’s coming back home from Japan the week of the marathon, so its possible he might be able to come along on the actual day. Anthony – I’m sure you and Kimiko have a lot of people and places to fit in that week but we’ll definitely catch up whilst you’re back!

And then today Sue and Tim Thomas, Gemma’s mum and dad, have made an enourmous donation of £100! Thank you so much, that’s an incredibly generous amount and was completely unexpected! You’ll also be able to see firsthand how the training is going this weekend as the plan is to do my final big training run along the seafront near Havant early on sunday morning! I’m apologising in advance for the state i’ll be in at the end!

With everyone giving so much, the challenge for me now is not to get complacent and to try and get as many people as possible to donate. I’ve still only sent out a tiny handful of emails so hopefully there are plenty of people left to get in sight of the target of £1250 with time to spare. Thanks again to everyone who’s helped get the total this far!

Help me reach £1250! Click here to go to the donation page!

Midweek Update

I’m trying to up the running a bit this week before I have to start tapering down. I was sent another official marathon magazine that talks a bit about tapering – I need to start 3 weeks before the race so I still have a bit of time to squeeze in some decent runs. I’ve done two 10k runs before work in the gym, both clocking in around 46 minutes. I was hoping to do another tomorrow, but my ankle injury hasn’t healed at all, so I might have to do some other kind of exercise to give it a chance to recover, especially as i’m planning to do the second 20 miler this weekend. I’ll need Gemma to help with the fluids again, so it’ll have to wait until sunday as she doesn’t get back from India until saturday. Already dreading it as the last one was pretty painful by the end. Still, tomorrow is one month to go so the end is now in sight!

The fundraising total is already up to £550. Many thanks to Uncle Mike and Gill who were the fastest family members off the mark, sending a cheque which arrived a couple days after the Melanie’s christening last weekend for £50!

Gemma has also donated an enourmous £250(!!) – a huge sum of money! Thanks honey, i’ll definitely return the favour when you run the marathon!

Time to start the fundraising!

Probably the best thing about running the marathon is that it’s not only an opportunity to do something positive for yourself but it’s also a chance to help out people who have been less fortunate. Charities offer “Golden Tickets” – guaranteed entry into the marathon in return for the runner pledging to raise a certain amount of money.

This year i’ve choosen to run for Childhood First as they’re a small charity so this money will make a real difference to them. They also feel like the local charity as they started in Godalming, which is where I regularly end up after jogging along the canal on a sunday morning. They do some amazing work with children who have had a pretty bad start to their lives, often involving abuse or neglect, which has left them with complex emotional problems – feelings of worthlessness, anger or mistrust of other people. As well as support and treatment, they run residential homes so that these kids can experience a stable ‘family’ environment, perhaps for the first time, whilst they get treatment. Its a cause i’m really proud to be supporting, and if you’re thinking about donating please take a bit of time first to read about some of the kids they’ve helped so that you’ll know more about where your money is going.

Because i’m really lazy somewhat disorganised there is now only about a month to go until the day of the marathon, so it’s finally time for me to pull my finger out and get started with the fundraising. Plenty of people have asked me what the easiest way to make a donation is, so i’ve set up a webpage that allows you to donate online:

Click here to go to the donation page!

Thank you so much for helping me to raise money for such a great cause! You’re all welcome to come along on the day itself to see how I get on (more details on this in the next few days!)

Ankle this time

Didn’t do a whole lot of running this week to give myself a chance to recover from last weekend. The highlight was a lunchtime run along the trail in the Devil’s Punchbowl that a group from the team at work used to Mountain Bike around before Nat’s wife said I couldn’t use her bike anymore (fair play really, it had been a couple of months). Managed to run a very hilly 5 mile course in about 40 minutes (which is comparable to the time it took us to bike it – I guess the uphills are a lot faster on foot) with warm winds, clear skies and a great view of the west end of London. Would like to do this again a few times next week, but the weather is supposedly changing back from summer to winter, with snow expected.

Got some good advice on Thursday in the gym changing rooms from a guy who had run both the New York and London marathons. I was asking him about how i’d got very cold during the last few miles of last weekends long run, which he said started happening as the body ran out of energy, and that I could put this off by managing my food and drink better before and during the run. He had taken gels (something i’ve never considered, but should probably try at least once) during his second marathon as the Lucozade stops become so heavily covered in spilt sugary energy drinks that it made his shoes stick to the floor as he ran. Now that the marathon is just around the corner I need to start thinking about how much ”fuel” I plan to take on. I’ll do some research over the next few days and jot down anything I find out here. 

Finished off the week with a 10 mile run to Pirbright and back. The temperatures had definitely dropped and there was a strong wind but I managed to keep the speed above a kilometer every 5 minutes, which is probably the pace i’ll aim for on the big day. The only downside was that I wore thinner gym socks and yet another body part took some heavy chaffing.

Yow!

The First 20 Miler

On Saturday I did would you could probably describe as my first “serious” marathon run – a 20 miler at pace. As the runs get longer its becoming increasingly hard to find routes that are long enough, so I decided to string together two ten mile tracks that i’d attempted previously. The route I had planned went from our flat in Guildford, out to Pirbright before turning back toward Guildford, descending through the town centre and then along the canal to Goldalming when I would replace my steps, finishing off back at the flat. The longest run I had done up to now was 16 miles, so this would be another fairly large step up in distance and would at least be in the same ballpark as the actual marathon.

It started off well – the Pirbright half was easily my best run yet – very easy going and I managed to keep up a steady pace of a kilometer every 5 minutes for the first 15 km. I was trying out some new music on the iPod – some long amatuer mixes i’d downloaded the previous night (you can download the two I was listening to here and here) – which help me power around this bit.

We also trying something else new as I got to the halfway point. The runs are now far enough that I can’t carry anything like the amount of fluid I need to get around – my running bottle only holds about 3/4 of a bottle of lucozade sport – so i’d arranged to meet Gemma at a road fairly close to our flat where she bought a refill for the running bottle and a clean running top. I couldn’t use the top as I was too tangled up in iPod wires but we executed a pretty smart bottle refil that involved tossing the bottle to Gemma as I ran by. She quickly refilled it and drove further down the road before throwing it back to me.

The second half turned out to be as hard as the first was easy. The canal route is still far too muddy – some it was like running over ice. By putting the canal route at the end also meant I had to run back through Guildford whilst it was busy and whilst I looked like a sweaty mess (in fairness this is pretty much anywhere after the first mile though). It also put a steep hill right at the end of the run. The last 10km were probably the hardest i’ve ever run – by this point I had the first Paula Radcliffe jelly neck going on and it was a real challenge to keep the pace above a 6 minute km. I also hadn’t taken on enough fluids as despite the bottle refill I rapidly became badly dehydrated. I really need to take a lot more drink on in the early stages as by the time I start to feel thirsty its far too late.

After making it up the hill (during which the pace dropped to a fairly pathetic 8km/hr) and into Queen Elizabeth Park where our flat is located, I still had around 1.5km to go. With the flat full of cold taps of running water in sight it was pretty hard to turn round and head out again but I jogged through the roads around the estate to try and make up the remaining distance. By this point my legs had pretty much given up so it was more stumbling than running and the humiliation was complete when an elderly man even had time to approach me for directions as I was going past.

Even though the time ended up being pretty good – under 3 hours (although if it kept up my earlier pace over the last 10km it would have been close to 2h 40m) – I can’t imagine how I could possibly run another 6 miles on top of this.

Regular 5 Miles

5 mile run at the gym in the morning. The nike+ kit only registered it as 4.7m though. I’m starting to realise that doesn’t deal with changes in speed very well – for the last 2km I picked the speed up from 13km/h to around 14km/h and didn’t see the change reflected in the readings from the nike+ kit. It uses a piezoelectric accelerator to determine how long my foot spends on the ground. Apparently this time can be directly related to the pace i’m running. I’ll try recalibrating it and see if that helps.

New Advances In Chaffage

Woke up early to run a half marathon (13.1 miles) before breakfast. Ran from the flat down the hill to Guildford and ran along the canal path all the way to the Sainsbury’s in Godalming. There were plenty of walkers and boats out near the rowing club, but there had also been heavy rain this week and stretch of the path had been turned into an impassible swamp which forced me to try a new route behind the park and ride. This lead to the discovery of a great running path secluded between the lakes and railway line that might be worth coming back to. There were no walkers or cyclers along here, but plenty of wildlife and even a couple of deers.

The run was definitely the most difficult of the long runs though, and the time was fairly poor – around 1h50m for the half marathon – but 10 minutes could have been knocked off waiting to cross roads and walking around / through the swampy parts of the course. I think the time would also have improved if i’d had a rest day on friday, so hopefully the 3h30m marathon time is still on. With four 5 mile runs plus the half marathon today thats a total of 33 miles, which is record for the week.

My right knee didn’t cause my any trouble at all, so i’m assuming the week off has let it heal completely. But…

Because of the cold I tried running in jogging trousers rather than the usual shorts. Although i’d taped or greased all the regular bits before the run the trousers don’t have the same lining as the shorts and this lead to unexpected chaffage of an entirely different kind. Needless to say, I won’t be posting pictures this time.

Death Not Immenent

My knee is still very painful, but Gemma found a reassuring article on Marathon running in the Times. It says that knee problems are a fairly common side effect of over training so I’m going to try and cut back by going a whole week without doing any training runs and assess it again then.

Gammy Leg

My right knee was sore but not painful this morning so I thought i’d try and get a medium sized run in. The plan was to run down the canal path to Godalming and back, which is a run I used to do occasionally when I lived with Tina and Gemma in Markenfield Road. The distance of our flat in Rivett-Drake close added a mile each way onto the run, but for some reason I decided to add an additional detour onto the start of the run, by going past the first house I shared with Tina, Claire and Adrian. By the time I got to Godalming i’d already racked up 7 miles and my right knee was starting to get painful. By the time I got back to the rowing club in Guildford it was too painful to run on, so I slowed down to walk it off. This turned out to be a big mistake as it quick seized up, making it impossible to start running again.

This meant I had to slowly walk the 3 miles to the flat. It was already a cold morning but it was made worse as the material they make modern running tops from quickly turns ice cold a few minutes after you stop running. Of course the easy solution would have been to find a phone box or a passer-by with a mobile in order to call home and get Gemma to come and pick me up. Unfortunately my memory is so poor I couldn’t remember either Gemma’s mobile phone number (which I call more than any other number) or our home number. Regardless, there didn’t appear to be a single payphone between our flat and the town centre – is this unique to Guildford or have they gone everywhere? Without being able to call for help, I had to hobble as fast as I could to try to warm up and avoid the potential embaressment of being the first jogger to die of exposure in central guildford.

When I finally did make it back Gemma didn’t seem at all surprised that i’d been gone for just over 3 hours so in future we’ll probably need to agree a time after which she send out the search party.