can't trace time....

When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009, I very quickly had to make two very important decisions: did I want to start taking a disease modifying drug (DMD)? If so, which one did I want to take?

Neither of these decisions is particularly easy. You’d imagine that everyone would want to be on a drug as soon as possible, but actually, NOT taking a drug is also a perfectly valid choice. MS is (currently) incurable and none of the drugs on offer can make any claim beyond *maybe* slowing down disease progression, although there will be no way of knowing if it’s doing you any good because everybody’s disease presents differently and advances at different rates. And, of course, they all have side-effects… which range from something as benign as getting a bit of a headache all the way through to developing a brain tumour. Nobody wants a brain tumour, do they? Lots of people actually find that the side-effects they do get are so awful that they would rather roll the dice and take nothing at all than face up to that.

For me, the decision was relatively simple: I would rather take something that might be doing nothing, than to take nothing…which is definitely doing nothing to help. The drug I chose was Avonex, and the reason I chose it was because it was a once-weekly injection into the muscle of my thigh that (at the time) I wouldn’t need to keep in a fridge. Yes, it involved a big needle, but I’m not squeamish and it meant a much lower level of general disruption to my life than some of the other drugs that needed injecting several times a week.

As it turned out, I seemed to tolerate the injections fairly well: a couple of paracetamol and 400mg if Ibuprofen before injecting at bedtime, and I seemed to be able to ride out the worst of any side-effects. Occasionally I’d wake up the morning after feeling completely drained, but I certainly never got any of the flu-like symptoms that many other users reported. I tolerated it well, my blood tests seemed relatively normal (on these sorts of meds, you need your blood monitoring to make sure they’re not doing you any form of mischief elsewhere) and, most importantly of all, my MS didn’t seem to be progressing. Never mind that newer therapies – many of which didn’t involve injections at all – were coming onto the market; why change?

For the last three or four winters, I seem to have become susceptible to chest infections that linger for several months. As a runner, this has been annoying, but it was only when my GP mentioned to me this year that this was something that was likely to happen to me every year now, that I even really began to think that it might be down to something other than bad luck. The drugs used to manage MS essentially work by damping down your immune system in an attempt to stop it going rogue and attacking my own nervous system. Is it really such a leap to imagine that suppressing my immune system might lead to other infections? Well, perhaps that was still a trade-off worth making… but then I started to get swelling and white mottling on my tongue and on the back of my throat. I didn’t have any signs of a bacterial infection and came back negative for fungal infection… was I starting to get an allergic reaction to my medication? One week, my throat swelled up within minutes of my injection, and my MS Nurses just told me to stop [I wrote about that the other week]

Did I mention that the MS Nurses are great? They've offered me front line support since the day I was diagnosed and one of the reasons that we support the MS Trust is because they provide the funding and training that helps the MS Nurses carry out their vital work.  We're running a marathon in April to raise money to support that work, and you can sponsor us here..... the MS Nurses all remember me when I ring because I'm the runner.  This money is needed precisely because it's so unusual to run a marathon with MS.  Most cannot.

Heck, on Saturday I ran 18 miles before breakfast! I was out of the house at 05:45 wearing a head torch!  I know!  And a 5.2 mile club cross-country race through knee-deep muddy water on Sunday!

Anyway.

A month later, my throat is clearing up… but what next? Obviously, it’s not much good taking nothing at all. I’m feeling better, but presumably the same decision I made in 2009 still applies: I’d rather be doing something than doing nothing. But what am I going to take? Well, I spoke to Kate the MS Nurse again today: apparently, although Avonex is one of the older treatments, it is also one that suppresses your immune system the least; all of the others hit you harder. But does that mean that taking them would make me even more prone to infection? Was the infection down to the Avonex suppressing my immune system, or was it something else? I’m told that it’s unlikely that my neurologist would want me to continue with it (only now do I learn that 9 years is a long time to be on Avonex), but it’s not clear where I go from here.

Meanwhile, I wait… and hope that I don’t have a relapse in the meantime.  It's something like this that helps me to remember how lucky I've been in the 9 years since I was diagnosed. I really haven't had any great dramas from my MS and - relatively speaking - I still don't really have a great deal to complain about.

At least I’m not very likely to catch a cold.

Swings and roundabouts.

* UPDATE -- the neurologist wants to see me. My next appointment is in November, so they're seeing if they can get me in over the next couple of weeks. His preference is to keep me on the Avonex as I've responded so well to it over the years, but.... who knows?

slow ride....

I went out running with a friend this weekend.  He's one of the most optimistic people that I know, and he told me that he was planning on running the full Robin Hood marathon in September.  He's a casual runner, but he's got a baby daughter who is only a few months old and he's not been able to get out much recently.  So he's decided he's going to run a marathon.  After all, how hard can it be?

He asked if I'd help him and talk to him about a training programme.  Of course.  He told me that he'd run a little over 10 miles the week before, so I suggested that we head out for a run together on Sunday.  As she's been in Romania most of the week, C. asked if she could come with us.  She brought her headphones with her in case we ran too fast and left her on her own.  Fine.

It was ok for the first six miles.  We weren't going especially fast, but we were running at a steady pace.  It was a lovely day.  It was nice.  And then I noticed that we were slowing down as my friend started to drop off the back.  From about mile 6 to mile 8, we got slower and slower and slower until we were basically shuffling along at about 13 minutes per mile.  It would have literally been quicker to walk.  At this point, C began running ahead of us and then running back, or stopping for a while and then running to catch us up again.  My friend seemed oblivious.  He was chatting away about how he felt like he could run at this pace forever.

This pace?  The one where we're BARELY MOVING?  Great.

He's got time to train, but I honestly don't think he has a realistic concept of either how far 26.2 miles really is, or quite how much work he's going to have to put in to get into the shape he's going to need to be in to get around.

Still.  We did 12 miles together and it was a beautiful day.

At one point, with a mile or so to go before we finally stopped and with my friend lagging behind again, my wife turned to me:

"You're a saint.  Do you know that?"
I was a touch confused.  "Why do you say that?"
"Because it's really, really hard to run more slowly than your natural pace, isn't it?"
"Is it?"
"Yes it really is.  This pace is between gears and it just seems so much harder to run at this speed.  I suddenly have a new found appreciation of what it meant for you to run the marathon with me last year."

Naturally, I said nothing and just smiled.

I KNEW SHE DIDN'T KNOW HOW BLOODY HARD IT WAS! I KNEW IT!

One of my colleagues was saying today how he was thinking of running a marathon with his wife.  His half marathon PB is about 1:40 and hers is about 2:10 and he was asking me about how we managed it when we ran at such different speeds.  I told him that I absolutely loved spending all that time training with my wife and sharing the experience of the race with her, but that it was really bloody hard.  Physically, it is really hard to run at a pace that isn't your own.  In some ways, it was much easier to run 40 minutes faster on my own this year than to run all that was at a pace that was awkward for me.  I crossed the finish line in 2015 knowing that I needed to run the race again on my own.

It was funny (and also kind of nice) that it took an interminably slow 12 mile, 145 minute plod for her to realise that.  Better late than never.... although I think that what she hasn't realised yet is that, if I had taken to running ahead and then running back to her as she trotted along, as she was doing on Sunday, then she probably would have killed me.  Sometimes you just have to suck it up.  I asked my friend if he fancied a run, and I wasn't about to start complaining about how quickly - or not - he was doing it.

".... but I was never this slow, right?"

No dear.

here we go again...

When I was asked to be one of the official bloggers for the London Marathon, part of the deal was that I submitted four or five posts in return for the free stuff they were going to send me.  Fine, although to be honest, I would have done it for nothing.  They don't seem to be very organised though: they were slow to get started and took ages to get posts up after they were submitted.  Not the end of the world, but a bit annoying.  After a long delay between the posting of my first and second posts, we agreed that I would submit a post for the week before the marathon, and one just after.  Well, a week after submitting my penultimate post, it still isn't up.  Well, bugger them.  I'm putting it up here because it's really to be read before the run.

So here it is:

-

With less than a week to go before the big day and as the taper kicks in, my mileage is coming right down to make sure that my legs are fresh and ready for the challenge ahead of them. But you know what? Tapering is hard! Daft though it sounds, after months of slogging through ever-increasing distances, stepping that distance down is surprisingly difficult. There’s a fairly large part of me that feels vaguely guilty that my last ‘long’ run will be no more than 6 miles. After all, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I was running 22 miles; it barely seems worth getting changed into my running kit for something as short as a measly 6 miles. And yet…at the same time, those 6 miles seem disproportionately difficult, with every muscle feeling heavy and every step along the way little more than a sluggish plod. If it’s this hard now, how on earth am I going to find the energy to run 26.2 miles on Sunday?

You’d imagine that running was mostly about how much strength you have in your legs, but the simple truth is that it’s at least as much about mental strength. As the novelist and keen amateur marathon runner Haruki Murakami astutely observed, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”. It doesn’t matter who you are or how hard you’ve trained, at some point during a marathon, you’re going to hit some sticky patches and you need to be prepared. What gets you through those difficult moments is your determination not to stop, to keep going no matter what. Did you see Eddie Izzard running 27 marathons in 27 days? It was an extraordinary undertaking from start to finish, but watching the documentary, the thing that struck me the most was Eddie’s steely focus on putting one foot in front of the other, however much it hurt and however much he wanted to stop. I’m only running the one marathon, but the mental approach is the same.

My motivation to keep going when the going gets tough? I’m humbled by the generosity of the friends, acquaintances and total strangers who have helped us raise money for a cause that is close to my heart. We raised £7,200 for the MS Trust in last year’s race, and when you factor in gift aid and suchlike, this year we’ve already raised more than £10,000. We've been lucky to have the support of Virtual Runner, but what's really floored me is the generosity of those people who sponsor us, or who buy a raffle ticket for the chance of a rubbish prize or who put their names down for a finishing time in my sweepstake that they know I haven’t got a chance of making. The MS Trust is a fine charity and I'm proud to be raising money for them, but the reason I keep putting one foot in front of the other is because of the faith people like you are putting in me. Thank you.

Of course, you can still sponsor us!
http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

See you on the other side!

-

So, there it is.  I imagine that it will go up on the London Marathon site at some point, but it seemed a shame to waste it.  Consider it an exclusive preview.

All that remains now is to run the bloody thing.

straight for your heart...

So, with that very gentle 2-miler, and after around 500 miles of training since Christmas, that's marathon training done!  There's now just the small matter of the 26.2 miles from Blackheath Common to the Mall on Sunday to go now....

Around £11,200 raised too, which should help keep me going along the way.  And look what arrived in the post today too.....

I guess there's more than one licensed guide runner in Nottingham now, so Pete is going to have to come up with a new brag.  I'm sure he'll think of something.

do it anyway...

Someone asked me the other day what my preferred weather would be for the marathon.

Hmm. Probably sunny but cool, but the honest answer is that it really doesn't matter. If training over winter has taught me anything, it's that you get the weather you get. If you have a 10 week midweek run in the training programme and it's dark and throwing it down with rain, then you still go out and do the run, don't you? I do, anyway.

If there's one thing about Sunday that I can't control, it's the weather... so it seems like a waste of energy worrying about it.

That said, this is ridiculous:

I guess I'll be packing a woolly hat and gloves that I don't mind throwing away, then.

Maranoia (n.): Fear of something going wrong (illness, injury, etc.) in the weeks before a marathon.

We've passed £10,000 in our fundraising, by the way.  Thanks for all your support and there's still time to donate!

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

parklife...

The London Marathon have published my second blog post.  Given the news today, it's turned out to be rather topical....it's about parkrun.

--

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. How many times in your life have you heard that expression? It’s only when you start training for a marathon that you leave metaphor behind and develop a rather more literal appreciation of what that phrase really means.

I’m sure that nearly everyone understands that a marathon is 26.2 miles long (or at least that it’s a really long way to run)… but it’s only when you train for one that you begin to understand that the run itself is really the easy part: those 26 miles are the last steps of a journey that has seen you spend hours and hours of your life running literally hundreds of miles through the cold and dark of winter.

Actually, funnily enough, even though marathon training is about the steady accumulation of miles, it’s the shortest runs in my training programme that have provided me with the most inspiration. Every Saturday morning, I attend my local parkrun at Colwick Park in Nottingham. Parkrun is a free, timed weekly 5km run that is open to everyone and takes place every Saturday morning in locations all over the world. What I love about it is how inclusive it is: the first finisher (parkrun doesn’t have a winner) might be running the course in 15 minutes, but there will be other people who take closer to an hour to cover the same distance but absolutely everyone is welcomed into the parkrun community.

I’ve met so many extraordinary and inspiring people at parkrun that I find my goodwill levels topped up every week. There are brilliant runners here who happily give up their own time to help other people by volunteering to help make the event happen. I’ve discovered that life is great in the volunteer’s high viz: waving runners in the right direction, manning the stopwatch or scanning people in at the finish… any role is a joy, even in the freezing rain. Whisper it quietly, but marathon training or not, I’ve maybe started to enjoy volunteering more on a Saturday morning than I do running... well, rest is an important part of any training programme, right?

It’s at parkrun too that I first got the opportunity to do some guide running with a visually impaired runner. How can you fail to be inspired and humbled by someone like that? My legs might be aching from a really long training run, but Terry can’t see and he still puts his trainers on most weeks and enjoys a run around the park. Sometimes he falls over, but he always picks himself back up, dusts himself off and keeps on running. It certainly puts all my problems into perspective, anyway.

Running can seem like a solitary sport, especially when you’re at the back end of a 22-mile training run and not a single person has offered you so much as a jelly baby. At parkrun, I’ve discovered a community that stretches well beyond a Saturday morning and it’s definitely changed my life for the better.

--

SuperKev from the Colwick core team posted this on Facebook today, and I really can't say anything more powerful than this, so I'll just leave it here:

"I met the most remarkable man at parkrun. Actually I've met lots of remarkable people there to be honest but this man stands out for me. He is visually impaired and he hadn't exercised for many years. This despite being an exceptional athlete before his health deteriorated. He has now along with various volunteer guides completed 100+ parkruns and is fitter and healthier than he has been for many, many years. But that's not all!...shortly after meeting a couple of us invited our new friend to join us at the pub. After an enjoyable evening chatting about all the things blokes chat about when at the pub he thanked us and told us that he hadn't been to a pub with his mates for over 10 years. He had effectively been a prisoner in his own home reliant on his wife to look after him. Not anymore...Now he is independent and will jump at the chance to take on new opportunities. I'm so proud of Terry and what he has achieved and I'm privileged to have him as a friend. I defy anyone to tell me that this volunteer lead organisation isn't changing lives for the better and that keeping it free for all isn't the way it should forever remain!"

parkrun is so much more than just a run in a park.

threads...

As part of the package for being selected as one of the official bloggers of the London Marathon,  I received a few freebies.  A few weeks ago, I was the lucky recipient of a pile of Lucozade nutritional stuff (jelly beans, drinks, protein bars etc.  Then, this weekend, the postman brought me a substantial parcel containing a whole pile of green accented, London Marathon branded adidas training gear and a pair of Ultra Boost ST trainers.  The trainers alone are worth £130, but apparently the rest of the gear (long-sleeved top, short-sleeved top, running tights and shorts) are also from towards the top-end of the adidas range.

...not that any of this particularly matters.  I would have written them blogs for nothing.  After all, I've been doing that here for more than a decade.

Still, if they want a few blogs in return for all this clobber, then I'm more than happy to oblige.  Here's what they say in the introduction piece on their website for this year's official bloggers:

"Meet the runners who will be sharing their training journey to the start line on Sunday 24 April in a regular blog. Follow their journeys as they complete their training and look ahead to race day as they each plot their course to hitting their goals in London! From the high of a new training PB to the low of a missed run due to illness or injury, training for a marathon is never easy, but it’s immensely rewarding, so don’t forget to support and follow our runners every step of the way".

Nice.  Except that they've only asked for one blog so far, which they put up a couple of weeks ago.  There are twenty days left until we line up at the start on Blackheath Common.... so exactly how much of my journey are people expecting to read?  Come to think of it, with all my longest training runs now done, how much are they realistically hoping that I will talk about all this lovely training gear they've sent me?  It's not as though I'm going to wear a completely brand new set of trainers now, is it?  In fact, I'm going to be wearing exactly none of this kit for the actual marathon itself.  I'm not a complete idiot.  Apart from anything else, I look like an especially ugly adidas catalogue model.

Well, what do I care?  I've got the kit now, right?

...except that I'm a blogger: the idea of writing the same shit that you good people have been reading here for years to a potentially completely different audience and passing it off as brand new work is an attractive proposition.  Surely you can understand that?  If you're lucky, I'll then republish the stuff from there on here, so you can enjoy the recycled drivel all over again.

It's win:win, as far as I can see.

this is why...

The MS Trust tweeted about me today, and I just got an anonymous donation on our page just now with the message, "I can't run to catch the bus, glad you can and you are doing this for us. Good luck.".

That basically just made me burst into tears because that really brings it home. Fundraising is a truly humbling experience on almost every level. If I ever needed any motivation to get through the miles, then this is it. It also gives me good reason to be thankful that I'm still physically capable of doing this at all.

Thank you, everyone, for all these donations. It really does make a difference to the lives of people who suffer from this horrible condition.

Please keep them coming. 32 days to go.

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

have no fear, the camera is here....

Exciting news!  The London Marathon website have unveiled the four bloggers who will be officially writing for them in the run-up to this year's race:

"Meet the runners who will be sharing their training journey to the start line on Sunday 24 April in a regular blog. Follow their journeys as they complete their training and look ahead to race day as they each plot their course to hitting their goals in London! From the high of a new training PB to the low of a missed run due to illness or injury, training for a marathon is never easy, but it’s immensely rewarding, so don’t forget to support and follow our runners every step of the way".

Hey....wait a minute!  One of those ugly mugs looks familiar.  Him in the blue tutu and MS Trust running vest.

What's he got to say for himself?

Age: 41
Location: Nottingham
Occupation: Activity Planning Manager
Running history: I hated running at school, but somehow got the bug as I got older and now run 5 days a week and about 1000 miles a year. My younger self would probably hate me, especially as I run instead of having lie-ins these days. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009, but this has made me more determined than ever to keep running because I'm stubborn and refuse to be beaten.
Target: To enjoy myself all the way around and to raise as much money as I can for the MS Trust
Loves... cake, pie and beer. Maybe this is the other reason I run so much....

41? Well, that's a bloody lie for starters!

Well, his first blog has been published.  To be honest, with 33 days to go, it's a little bit late to be following him every step of the way through training, but better late than never, eh?

I'll copy it down here, but I suppose you can always go and look at it in-situ for yourself, if you like.

--

My name is Tim and I’m a runner. I haven’t always considered myself a runner and it still seems odd to say it out loud now, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to deny. I loathed cross-country runs at school and used to walk as often as I thought I could get away with it.

And yet, here I am about to run my second ever marathon and my second in London. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to run one marathon could be regarded as unfortunate, but to run two looks like carelessness.

Completing a marathon is an achievement for anybody: 26.2 miles is a distance that demands respect and should never be undertaken lightly. To be perfectly honest, a marathon is something that I thought would be completely beyond me. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009 after first developing symptoms in 2005. It’s an unpredictable disease that affects everyone differently, but for me it mainly brought pins and needles, fatigue, numbness and a loss of muscle strength in the left-hand side of my body. I thought I might have to give up running for good in 2013 as I picked up a succession of injuries in the hip, knee and foot on my left side - injuries that were all caused by that underlying weakness.

Fast forward to April 2015, and I was lining up on Blackheath to run my first ever marathon. How on earth did I get there? Well, freakish luck in getting a ballot place at my first attempt aside, we can probably chalk it up to a combination of determination, a stubborn refusal to give in and let the damn disease beat me and the support of lots of wonderful people in my running life, not least my amazing wife, who ran the whole marathon and almost every step of the training by my side.

I know how lucky I am: at every MS clinic I attend, I see people in the waiting room at the hospital with their walking sticks and their wheelchairs. I know exactly what kind of damage this disease can wreak to a person’s body and to their life. No one can say for sure if any of these things lie in my future, but knowing what could happen makes me doubly determined to wring every last drop out of life and to push myself as hard as I can for as long as I can. I’m also determined to raise as much money as I can through my running to support a charity very close to my heart: The MS Trust. https://www.mstrust.org.uk/

Training hasn’t been easy this year, but I know that every mile I run and every penny I raise will go towards helping people cope with the uncertainty of a diagnosis with MS.

You can find my sponsorship page here: http://virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

Or if you want to support me and earn a really cool, glow-in-the-dark Darth Maul medal, then details of my Virtual Run are here: http://www.virtualrunneruk.com/enter-revengesixth

--

What a big head, eh?  Just who does he think he is?

I'm still yawning...

I need to apologise to everyone.

I've been listening to my conversation over the last few weeks, and I've realised quite how much of it is taken up by talking about running.  I suspect that this is boring to other runners, never mind to normal people....

I suppose this is a natural and inevitable side-effect of the fact that, as marathon training continues to ramp up remorselessly, more and more of my time is spent either running or thinking about when I'm going to fit in my next run and what routes I'm going to take to make up the mileage.... It's bad enough that this dominates my every waking moment, and I don't really mean for this to leak out into conversation, but it does.

Even when people aren't actively asking me about it (and, amazingly, even people who aren't runners are sometimes polite enough to at least pretend to be interested in my running), the simplest enquiry seems to lead to running:

Any plans for the weekend?
You look tired. Are you okay?
Fancy a beer later?
Are you watching The Jump?

OK, so maybe the person who asked me that last one was expecting me to talk about Dean Cain and Ricky from Eastenders or something and not my 8 mile mid-week training run, but I just can't help myself.

In an attempt to make myself slightly more diverse in my conversation, I've been ramping up my efforts to get through Breaking Bad.... but as I'm still on Season 3 and at least 5 years behind the curve, most people who have watched it are are too scared to say much n case they accidentally spoil it for me.  I had this conversation with a friend at choir last night who is a big fan:

"So, where have you got up to?"
"Oh, I'm on the episode with the Fly, and my heart was in my mouth when I thought that Walt was going to accidentally tell Jesse about walking out on Jane that time..."
"Um..... how's the training going?"

Yeah.

So.  Sorry.  I did this to you last year too, didn't I?  It won't happen again.  I promise.

What?  I said that last year too?

hood famous..

At around about the same time as I committed to the MS Trust that I would run the marathon for them again, I stumbled across something from the London Marathon team.  I can't remember if it was an email, on their website or in their magazine or what... but they were asking for people to put themselves forward to be one of their official bloggers.

I actually applied for this last year, but clearly nothing came of it.  I can remember looking at the six people they had chosen, although I didn't subsequently look at any of their posts because I didn't really think anything more about it.

I applied again.

They ask you to put down a few details about yourself and to say why you think you should be picked.  Here's what I put:

"I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009, four years after first developing symptoms. MS is a chronic, incurable condition that it affects people in all sorts of insidious ways....but I want everyone to know that a diagnosis doesn't have to be the end of life as you know it; I want to challenge people's preconceptions of what the condition is and what it means for the people who have it. When you receive news like that, you have a choice: you can either wallow and mope about the things you’ve lost and can no longer do, or you can get on with life and focus on what you can do. In 2012, I was reduced to running 3 miles a week because of issues related to my MS and thought my running days were over. Three years later, I ran my first marathon with my wife at London in 2015 (raising £7200 for the MS Trust). I’m doing the whole thing again in 2016. I've been lucky with how MS has affected me, as I can see by looking around in the waiting room of every clinic I attend, but a marathon is still a massive, exhausting challenge... but that's true for every single person who runs one. Come along on the journey with me as I stumble and curse my way through the long, lonely miles to the starting line. I’ve been blogging since 2004, and I’d be delighted to share my journey on the London Marathon website!"

Nothing you haven't heard before, right?

I mailed it off and put it out of my mind.  Earlier this week, I got an email out of the blue telling me that I was one of the people selected to blog the 2016 London Marathon.  Out of 50,000 people with entries, I was one of six chosen.  The email pointed me at last year's blogs, to have a look at their profiles and to use them as a model to for one I needed to write and send back in.  Looking at them now, it looks as though they didn't have much luck.... I don't think a single one of them blogged about the actual race, and a couple of them didn't manage to put up an entry beyond January.  Perhaps one of the key reasons for my selection is that, if I'm anything, I've got ten year long track record of regularly putting up blog posts!

I don't think they actually want very much: probably about three posts between the end of February and the event itself, and one afterwards to say how it went.  In return, as well as the obvious opportunity to stoke my own ego, I get to boost the profile of the MS Trust and to float our sponsorship link in front of a few more people and hope that some of them bite and make a donation.  It can't hurt, anyway.

Apparently I'm also going to get a boatload of free London Marathon Adidas training kit and running shoes, and a bunch of stuff from Lucozade.  Expect pictures of me kitted out even more like a total tool than normal, and expect a load of repetition of shit I've written about on here so often that you could probably recite it back in your sleep.

Good times.

I'm going skiing on Saturday, so I'm actually going to leave my trainers behind for a week.  Before then though, I've taken the day off work tomorrow so that I can squeeze in an 18 mile run.  I don't think this is the kind of day off that my younger self quite imagined.  I might get a haircut too.

I could fascinate...

Marathon training is a funny thing.

Well, I say funny, but what I actually mean is all-consuming. I’m in week 6 of a 16 week programme that culminates in the 26.2 miles from Blackheath Common to the Mall on 24th April, but already, most of the time when I’m not actually running is spent thinking about my next big run. I’ll give you an example: my training programme says that my long midweek run this week needs to cover 8 miles. For the sake of time-efficiency, at the moment I’m breaking my long mid-week run up into two pieces by running the 3.6 miles to the office in the morning and the 3.6 miles home in the evening. This isn’t quite the same thing as running 7 miles all in one go, but the mileage is the same and the run home in particular is good training on tired legs. As these runs soon start to peak over 10 miles, I think I’m going to just run them in one go in the evenings when I get home from work, but for now I’m happy enough to break it up.

There’s a problem. As I’m sure you can probably work out for yourself, 3.6 miles plus 3.6 miles does not equal 8 miles. As anyone who has trained to a programme like this before, you can add miles to your training runs, but you can’t run less than you have scheduled. For me at least, it’s really important that I line up at the start of my marathon knowing that I haven’t taken any shortcuts and that I’ve put in the mileage required to be able to get me around the course in one piece.

So this morning, I got up into my running kit, ran to the doctor’s surgery for an appointment. It's on the way to work, but once I was done there, I ran back on myself to add another mile or so to my run before heading into work.  That way, I could make make sure that my total this evening covered the full 8 miles. Ridiculous, right?  And I had to plan that out in advance and everything, you know. And as I was planning that, I was simultaneously mapping out my route for my Sunday 16 miler in my head: a long loop of the Embankment from Lady Bay bridge is about 6 miles. If I run that and then throw in a 10 mile Big Track loop, that will be my miles covered. Job done. I should get another few hours of “Wolf Hall” done too.

You see?  All-consuming.

I’m going skiing in a couple of weeks. We’re going Saturday to Saturday, so this means that I can get my long run in on the Sunday after we get back, but that I need to cover my long run before we go. So.... I’ve taken that Friday off so that I can fit an 18 miler in before we go. That's what normal people do with their holiday time, right? If you’re interested, I’ll tell you the route I’m considering.

No? Suit yourselves.

I’ll still be taking my running gear to Austria, obviously… but I think I can cope with missing the midweek runs as long as I have the long runs covered.

So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that I’m spending an awful lot of time at the moment either running, or thinking about running. The really worrying part is that I’ve still got ten more weeks of this to go and the mileage is only getting bigger from here.

Just as long as I’m not boring anyone though, yeah?

We’re running to raise money for the MS Trust. You can sponsor us here:

http://virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

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...