runography

Over the past year I’ve been very sporadic in my training, some months doing as little as 6 miles of running. I’m not close to the way I felt when I did my the Great Scottish Run in under 1:48. It’s been getting me down, not to mention increasing my girth. Manged to get back up to 13st 4lb, from my 12st 2lb slimmest.

Well, that’s all about to change again, Marathon training starts this week. 16 weeks to go and I’ve been preparing myself nicely over the last few weeks. I’m now running 10km in 56 mins, not fast I know, but it’s a good start since I had managed to drop to just over an hour. It’s fairly easy to see why, if you only run once every 4 weeks or so, you aren’t going to keep the pace.

Aim is to not miss any sessions, training program has tempo/speedwork on Tuesdays, long runs on Fridays and recovery runs on Sundays.

More to follow, including a link to my program, if I can get the link to work properly. In the meantime, I’ve just realised my road tax is due today, so better sort that out before midnight.

http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/racing/runners-world-smartcoach/3057.html?uan=3057&hour=0&mins=50&secs=0&rlen=tenk&rdst=mara&mpwe=16&startf=123xyz&diff=vhard&lrdy=5&slen=16&trainstart=ds1265063237084&metr=miles

Unfortunately this year I won’t make the Edinburgh Marathon. My training was cut short through injury due to an overtight IT Band. I had been really looking forward to it and had raised a couple of hundred pounds for charity.

I remember sitting on the bus last year on my way to the relay drop off point and thinking John was crazy to be attempting the marathon. A year down the line I was hoping to do it myself. I’m not sure where to go from here, do I re-try for Inverness in October? Do I wait for a 2nd shot at Edinburgh next year? I’m going to get back into training and build up slowly, making sure I stretch out the IT Bands as much as possible.

My current target is the Glasgow 1/2 marathon in September, will try and beat last years time of 1:47:33… fingers crossed no more injuries.

Can’t shake off this injury problem at the moment, I have tried a number of runs and it keeps coming back. I had a weeks rest then ran 15 miles on my attempt at a 20 miler. Within a few miles I was getting pain, by the time I was at 12-13 miles it was very painful, I had to stop at 15 miles as I was doing almost 11min/mi at that point and not impressed. Should have been under 9min/mi.

I took another week off from running and tried again, this time I managed 10.5 miles, the first time I felt the pain was just under the 3 mile mark. When I was reaching the 10 mile mark I stopped to help and old lady through an underpass (seriously, she was too scared to go in because she’d been attacked there before, that was my good deed), when I started running again the pain was bad in my right leg and was slowing me down, I then felt the same pain starting on my left leg.

That was enough, one leg I can deal with, but both

Had a couple of sports massages and the like, I think my IT Band is getting stretched a bit, but not enough. I decided on Tuesday last week, 28th April, that my Marathon was over for this attempt. I’ve not run since, but did play football on Tuesday of this week, that seems to be fine and didn’t aggravate the problem. I’m wondering if the fact I had stopped playing football led in some way to the injury. The variety of movements on the field stretch the leg out a lot more than just running all the time. I have played 2 games this week and have decided to keep trying for the marathon and not to rule it out just yet. Ye-ha, or more fool me, one of the two.

I also managed to pick myself up a 2nd hand bike from Cycleography as he has recently upgraded his bike. I’m going to add a bit of cycling into my training and possibly even start commuting to work.

It’s around 10.5 miles each way, so should take about 30 mins to get into work, 10 mins more than the car, but a lot less of a pollutant. It’s been 10 years since I was out on a bike for any length of time. I bought a bike for cycling to Uni and lasted 3 days until it rained and put me off. I was also pretty unfit and overweight then, so that didn’t help backside comfort much. I’ll give it a go anyway.

That’s about all I have to talk about at the moment.