Progress – Running Between The Water Stations

Long time coming…

On Sunday, it’ll be 8 weeks till the marathon and one week until Warwick Half. This is my ‘de-load’ week. I’m scaling back the amount of running this week, to allow my legs to rest and consolidate all they’ve learnt over the past few weeks. Last week, I was mostly in Lincoln. Which meant I…

Fundraiser – want to come?

I’m writing a blog today because my muscles – specifically my gluteus maximus muscles – are super DOMS-y from Becky’s new weights routine, and consequently I’m no good for much else but sitting down. Tuesdays are now more varieties of squat than I even knew existed – including some olympic lifting that involves me *stamping*…

Old Dog…

Seems you *can* teach an old dog new tricks, and this weekend I’ve done me some learning. Having smashed my Thursday fast short run, Becky and I took a look at my data. Specifically, I wanted to know why I’ve found it so hard to run any distance lately. We looked at heart rate and…

NAILED IT!

Today I set out for my fast 6km Thursday run. You remember me whingeing last week about how “fast” and “8km” were mutually incompatible ideas? Well I discussed it with Becky, and she agreed that perhaps we should start the build-up at 6km. So this week, my first official marathon training week, was a fast…

Early morning Christmas weights

So the dog is ready to be roasted by an open fire… and this morning, I got up early and went to the gym. As usual. Christmas Schmistmas! This morning’s session marked the end of my pre-training strength training. Starting tomorrow, I am officially marathon training. I’m taking a very different approach this time, though….

Listening to the brag of my heart

Many reasons why this post is so entitled… It’s about confidence; it’s about survival; it’s about I am, I am, I am. At the end of last year, I was reading the Run Mummy Run Facebook group, where people were discussing their annual stats. And I wondered – I genuinely did – how they knew….

Training Peaks

So I’ve downloaded the Training Peaks app. This does all kinds of spooky, but kind of convenient stuff. The web interface gives you an excellent calendar view of your training plan (in the picture at the top of this post), and sets up an iCal/Google/Outlook calendar which you subscribe to. This rather spookily puts your…

Kit inspector (Week 1, day 2)

I have all kinds of confused myself, today. The programme said 5 x 400m intervals with a rest of 200m in-between each. Don’t forget to warm up and cool down. That’s what it said. Learning the lesson of yesterday (Go early. Eat something. Seek shade.) I set off for Oxford at 7am and ran intervals…

Over the finish line!

I’m in that mass of people. We gathered in Preston Park at 8:30 yesterday morning, where I met up with a handful of the Run Mummy Run community, and chatted in particular to one lovely lady [edit: it was Lisa Jay, who was a star!] as we queued roughly forever for the race toilets… And then…

It’s today!!

I’m drinking tea in the living room of the impossibly cool house we’ve rented in Brighton. God bless Air BnB!! I’d like to tell you my race kit is neatly laid out on the floor. It was, yesterday. Today there’s a jumble of things, I’ve just eaten breakfast (chia porridge with strawberries, omega seeds and…