Oh boy, lots of things have happened since my last post, I've bought another pair of shoes (as the pair I bought in September are wearing out!) and poor old Birg has injured her leg... this week I ran a total of 39.5 miles which took me 8hours 25 minutes..... yesterday I ran 17.5 miles and could hardly lift my feet by the end..... yes, a lot's happened since my last post (Birg's OK now by the way, following nightly hot water bottle treatment)
I've changed from the Flora London Marathon training programme I was following to one from the Runner's World magazine, the beauty of this one is that it can be downloaded to my GPS so it beeps at you if you're going too fast or too slow and when you've finished each step and need to move up a pace or relax a bit, for example last Tuesday I had to do the following set and the GPS kept me on track with various (annoying actually) beeps:
1 mile warm up at a pace between 11:40 and 12:00 minutes per mile
1.5 miles fast (a pace between 9:08 and 9:28 minutes per mile) - made it just
0.25 miles recovery (a pace slower than 12:00 minutes per mile) - walked!
1.5 miles fast - did a bit better 9:26 pace
0.25 miles recovery - walked
1.5 miles fast - did even better 9:23 pace!
0.25 miles recovery - staggered!
1 mile cool down at a pace between 11:40 and 12:00 minutes per mile.
Birg had a day off and was at home when I finished, I staggered into the house and couldn't speak, I collapsed in a chair and sat there steaming, I wasn't angry, I was steaming.
Oh, I've been losing weight again with all this training, I'm back down to 86Kg
I just booked our hotel for the Saturday night before the Marathon. I've been looking since early January but all London hotels were fully booked for that Saturday night..... with hindsight, there's going to be 40,000 people descending on London to run the Marathon, they're going to want to sleep somewhere, I should have booked somthing before I'd got the marathon place, I could have always cancelled it. Anyway, I was looking again this evening when I had a bright idea, rather than looking towards central London, look outwards into Kent. Hey presto, Dartford has a Holiday Inn Express 1.5Km from the station, which in turn is a 32 minute ride from Greenwich, the start point. This is ideal as we can just drive round the M25 on Saturday morning, go looking around BlueWater shopping centre in the afternoon and then walk to the station in the morning. The only minor problem is that they only have double rooms, twin rooms and six man rooms - OK, so we'll have a few spare beds then!