runography

Another day and another idea comes flooding in. Sitting at my desk tonight around 5.30pm Roddy pipes up with the idea of running the Edinburgh Marathon on May 25th 2008, as a relay team, in what’s called the Hairy Haggis Relay.

Effectively we have a team of 4 relay runners and each one does a section of the 26.2 mile course. The idea behind us joining in the relay is to give a running partner to John who is going to be running the entire course. John reckons it’s a great idea and it’ll give him some company during the race, so it looks like it’s a goer.

So our relay team consists of:

Drum roll:

• Roddy – 8 Miles (The Royal Leg)
• Stephen – 5 Miles (The Cock & Pan Leg)
• Derek – 8 Miles (The Gosford Leg)
• Runography – 5 Miles (The Glory Leg)

Derek and Roddy are the stronger runners (well stronger than me anyway) so I’ll let them do the 8 miles. Not sure which order we are going to go in though. The 5 mile sections are section 2 and 4. I think I’d prefer section 4, by that time John will be running at my pace. Besides, it also means I get to share all the glory of the finish line with John. Sneaky character that I am.

Edit: We now have our 4th runner, Stephen, I’m sure he’s happy to do leg 2.

Johns current aim is completing the marathon in under 4hrs, with an average pace of around the 9-minute mile mark, we can help act as pace setters for him and hopefully motivate him when the going gets tough. As we get closer to the event we will no doubt get a better idea of the actual minute-mile pace, but provided it’s no more than 8-minute miles we should be good to go. It’s good training for me and gives me more experience before the MHFS 10k in June.

Hopefully this will give John some support to get within that 4hr target.

The cost to enter is £100 or we can do it for charity. We’ll have to decide how we want to approach this. This should be a good day out, the field is huge, with around 14,000 entries. I’m happy I’m doing 5 miles and not 8, or even worse, 26.2…

Tomorrow, I have my longest training run yet, a 7 miler and I’m not phased. You can’t stop progress.