Month: February 2016

A Creaking Engine

I stepped out of the door this morning and began to run.

I’d been looking forward to this run all week. I get out there for 2 to 3 hours and just roam around, taking in the scenery and feeling the joy of piling on more miles to make my legs stronger and more prepared for the trials to be imposed by the London Marathon. I will often struggle a little at first until everything is at working temperature and then I just start scooping up the miles. Today was different and I don’t really know why.

I had a fine midweek run where I was zipping along quite nicely and a really good parkrun yesterday where I felt fit and strong. Today however all my joints seemed creaky and sad. It made me think of an old engine that has been left in a leaky garage for the last 20 years. Try to start it up and it will valiantly struggle but you’ll get little more out of it other than a few coughs and splutters. My body felt something like this. I imagined that what it probably needed was to be completely dismantled and soaked in a bath of oil for about a week. Then to be lovingly reassembled before being coaxed back into life.

The above didn’t happen. Maybe this is a good thing as I’ve never been disassembled before and I’m not sure I could cope with the trauma.

What did happen was that I just gutted it out for 13 miles and then staggered back home feeling terribly sorry for myself and completely baffled as to why my body is letting me down.

Hopefully things will go better next Sunday for the Cambridge Half Marathon.

Guess How Long It Will Take Me To Run London Marathon

I’ve set up a sweepstake on a page run by a site called Guess To Give asking you to guess how long it will take me to run the London Marathon.

It costs 5 pounds to make a guess and you can make as many guesses as you like (although it will cost 5 pounds each time). From that money, 1 pound goes to the prize fund (the amount you can win), 3 pounds and 70 pence goes to Save The Rhino (if gift aid is included or 3 pounds and 30 pence if not) and I’m assuming that the other 70 pence goes to the web site.

So, that’s the logistics but i hope the fun bit will be trying to guess.

You could ask I suppose but it’s all unknown territory to me. I’ve never run 26.2 miles before so really have very little idea how long it will take me to run that far in London on the 24th of April 2016.

There are, however clues and if you pay close attention you will see more clues as we approach marathon day. The best of these clues are probably to be found on a page of my web site called ‘race log‘,  .This page contains my finishing time for every organised race in which I take part. If you want to see my training runs then take a look at my Strava link.

Good luck and hope you enjoy trying to guess.