Thursday 7 January 2016

let's go round again...

My marathon training programme officially started on Monday. To be honest, it hasn’t really stopped. Whilst I didn’t keep up the super-long runs after I crossed the finishing line on the Mall in late April 2015, I have kept a 10 mile run on my regular training routine… upping it to just over 11 miles a little before Christmas. Even so, even if the initial mileage isn't much different to what I would normally be doing, the start of the training programme still feels like a significant milestone; the start of the countdown to the London Marathon in some 15 weeks time.

107 days….

I haven’t actually done all that much yet: it's the first week, and it's a gentle introduction to the miles that lie in my immediate future.  Last week, I treated myself to a very rare weekend completely off exercise – well, the next one will be in May at the very earliest and I can’t remember the last one - and then eased myself in with 4.5 miles on Monday, the 3.5 mile run into work on Tuesday morning and then the 3.5 mile run home in the evening, 6 miles tonight, the 5km of parkrun on Saturday (wearing my newly arrived and proudly earned 50 run milestone t-shirt) and then 10 miles on Sunday. That's a mere 30-odd miles in the week compared to the 20-odd I'd normally do.

Even so, it’s probably no real surprise that I’ve already spent a fair bit of my time this week asleep on the sofa before heading up to bed early to sleep like a log…. Sleep only interrupted by my cramping calf muscles, obviously.  I now keep my magnesium tablets upstairs so I can take them just before bed.

And this is week 1 of the programme. The mileage only ramps upwards from here. My peak training week last year was

Still, I’ve got a new pair of trainers that I started breaking in this evening, and I’m just getting started into a new audiobook to accompany the next couple of weeks of runs (“Wolf Hall”), so it’s all good. New shorts arriving tomorrow too.

Simple things.

Oh, and you can sponsor us here! Thanks to Virtual Runner, we’ve got off to a flying start with our fundraising (and you can still sign up for the Revenge of the Sixth Darth Maul medal here), but there’s loads of fundraising to be done yet.

And miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep...

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