Finishing the London Marathon 2012

London is a spectacular marathon to run. The sights, the crowds and an incredibly upbeat atmosphere. This year, I was lucky enough to be only 20-25 seconds behind the Elite men crossing the start line, meaning I saw them sprint off at the gun and was left in awe, knowing that they'd keep that blistering pace up for the duration.

As for my start, well, it's worth noting that the first half of London is where all the downhill bits are, and having looked across several people's times, very few of the elites appear to have managed a negative split, which says something. You drop about 150 feet in the first 4-5 miles and that, combined with the usual setting off too fast, meant the first several miles were quick. 7:05-7:15 per mile quick!

About 3 miles in, clocking a 22 minute 5km, I knew the pace was too quick to sustain so I eased off the hammer a bit, but not too much. I also felt that there was no way I'd sustain it, but I then thought how will I ever know and, isn't it all just psychological anyway?

Another factor was the additional 1% drift mileage (that's my term, it's not official), caused by straying from the blue racing line. It meant that my minute mile-ing needed to be about 5 seconds quicker than planned, so my 7:25 goal suddenly needed to become 7:20 on my Garmin, which scared the bejeebas out of me.

I'd planned heading out at just under 7:30 (on the Garmin), having notched 20 miles in training without too much hassle at that pace, and then ramping up from about 10 miles. That plan went to pot due to downhills, 1% and general lack of ability to rein it in at the start.

So, there I was at 13.1 miles and 1:36 into the race, having just done a little sprint while running past one of my supporters, now knowing I had to average 7:20 (Garmin) for the second, hillier, half of the race. Also knowing that I was about 3/4s spent.

The slowest miles, mentally, not actually, were from around 15 to 19. You're still heading away from the finish and you've not long run past the leaders heading in the homeward direction at mile 22! Seeing them float past on the other side of the road is at once inspiring and depressing, as the realisation of how long it will take you to reach that point hits.

Part of the route around the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf feels narrow, wiggly and has road humps, making it difficult to settle into a rhythm. The miles were a struggle, well, let's be fair, everything after 13 miles starts to feel like that.

I saw my wife at 19, which is when you turn and start heading for home. Her, and the crowds joining in to cheer me on around her, gave me the lift I needed to keep up my pace for another couple of quick miles. Overall, I could sense my pace was only going to get slower and had mentally readjusted my target to "just get a PB".

At 21 miles, I could really feel it, of course I was ready for it, but even still, there she was and it was all I could do to ignore her and focus on the 20 feet of road ahead of me.

I then heard my friend's distinctive yell from the crowd and gave it another little burst, at least I thought I sped up, but I was soon just putting one foot in front of the other in a trance-like state. Dark miles.

I spotted a runner a 100 yards or so in front of me flapping his arms to raise the crowd and decided to give it a go myself. It worked and the field was strung out enough that, when they did, I knew they were cheering for me, which gave me a 20 second boost every time, using energy I didn't really have, so I had to be careful.

Let it be said that the supporters along the London Marathon route are superb, any moment you're feeling it's hopeless, a glance into the crowd will usually find someone, despite the numbers around you, looking at you and willing you on.

23-24 was a good mile, through the tunnel, with nicely lit up cats eyes. It gave me another distraction, pretty lights, and no noise or crowd, me time allowing me to re-focus. I ratcheted up the pace through the tunnel and overtook a couple of folk along the way.

Out the other side, we were faced with an underpass. You don't need those at 24 miles, it felt quite steep and intimidating with 1000s of people gawping over the railings from 100 feet above. I felt weak and small.

At 25 I caught someone's eye cheering for me, "Come on Children with Cancer", and it helped a little, but I was down to 9 minutes a mile by then and had calculated that even if I walked I'd still PB. That is not a good mindset to have. Weirdly I felt far tougher running Kielder. As bad as I felt at 23, 24 around that lake, I managed to keep sub-8 minute miles going, despite all the extra pain it was causing me.

The crowd and the "does it really matter if I'm 3,196th or 3,253rd out of about 37,500?" factor, compared with the smaller races, where places start to mean something, made it harder for me to convince myself to drive myself into the ground.

I managed a few surges, with the help of arm-flapping induced cheers, in the final mile, but the classic was the last 200 metres.

200 metres to go, time on the clock 3:18:15-ish. Easy money. Sprint finish! I had the energy, but after 100 metres my leg cramped up on me and I literally stopped with 100 metres to go and 3:19 on the clock. A volunteer ran over to me and told me to stop running or I wouldn't be walking over the finish line. I rested a little, then said I'd rather hop than walk on assisted. So, there was me, with a hop, skip and an occasional run, making my way over the line, aiming for breaking 3:20, but just missing it.

So, there it is, 3:20:02. A happy man, especially happy as it means I've got another target to beat!

2 weeks to London

With exactly 2 weeks to go I'm fully into the taper in the run up to this year's London Marathon, taking place on 22nd April. I've slipped off plan on a few occasions, but have managed to make it this far without picking up any injuries and feel I've struck a happy balance between training, social, work and family life. The two keys being the plan I've followed and a very supportive wife.

A summary of my training, from the 1st January 2012 to date, is as follows:

Activity	Count	Distance (miles)	Time (h:m:s)	Avg Speed (mph)	Avg Duration
Running	44	375	48:40:09	7.7	1:06:22
Swimming	22	9.2	6:10:00	1.3	0:16:49
Cycling (mostly commuting)	10	189	14:54:12	13.7	1:29:25
Misc (Ski/Hike)	7	-	15:30:00	-	2:12:51

Discounting skiing, hiking and 75% of my cycling, as generally cycling was while commuting to work, the total time spent specifically on training amounts to:

66 hours over the past 14 weeks, or an average of 4h45m per week

Working this out confirms how I've managed not to allow marathon training to impact on my life too heavily, which is in stark contrast to my first marathon. Of course, you can always look back afterwards and think what if, but my ethos has been more of one to make provision for natural turbulence along the course of my training and not allowing the occasional knock to affect my outlook.

Yes, I dare say if I put my life on hold and dedicated it to train like an athlete, I might be able to break the magical 3 hour barrier, but what would happen to the rest of my life in the process? I enjoy my running, I enjoy the freedom it affords, the space to think, or not think, and the needed push it gives to keep the rest of your life in a healthy balance. I'm going to keep things as they are and won't be hanging up my running shoes any time soon, marathon PB or no PB in two weeks' time!

That's more like it / 8 weeks until London

Despite it not being the best week for sleep, as far as my running was concerned, it was spot on.

My two key mid-week sessions this week were 12x400s and a 6 mile tempo run, both of which were expectedly tough. Of the two, I found the 12 reps of 400m simpler to get my head around, in that envisioning yourself having a rest in 400 metres time make it easier to cope, albeit that you're only going to get 1:30 of rest in between.

The 6 miler was particularly tough and having only managed around 6 hours sleep, in the previous two nights combined, didn't help. The run was broken down into a 2 mile warm up, followed by 3 miles pretty much flat out, finished off with 1 mile easy. The mid section was at such a pace that I cleared 4.8km in 19:30, just shy of my 5km PB! But that's the thing with running, you never know quite what you can achieve until you really push it and you're often surprising yourself with what you can do.

9 weeks to London Marathon / My plan

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, so a bit of an update on what's gone on in between.

First off, some background on how I try to plan out my week. I start my weeks on a Monday and culminate them on the weekend, trying to get my long run out of the way on the Saturday so I can relax on Sunday and recover before Monday's interval training kicks the cycle off again.

Broadly, I'm following the 3plus2 training plan, which I've mentioned in a previous post. The quick summary is that it involves 3 intense running sessions and a couple of cross-training sessions. For me, this equates to the following being my typical week:

Monday - Intervals (45 mins) e.g. 6x800m with 1:30 Recovery Interval
Tuesday - 20 mile cycle (1h20 commute to and from work)
Wednesday - Tempo run (45-60 mins); 20 min swim drills
Thursday - REST
Friday - 20 min swim drills
Saturday - Long run (18-20 miles; 13 mile on easy week)
Sunday -  REST

Yes, perhaps this should be the 3plus3 plan, but given my weedy 20 min swim efforts and the fact that I'm claiming a commute to work as cross-training, I'm not counting them as proper workouts and just hoping my 3 non-running sessions actually add up to 2 proper ones.

Here's how the week commencing Mon 6th Feb looked.

We'd had a little snow that week which made for a stunning long run on Sunday. The air temperature had remained cool preserving much of the snow in the woods where the sun couldn't quite reach it. In fact, that Saturday run has to go down as one of my favourites. I took in several woodland areas, including chancing upon a superb cross-country race course 30 minutes or so from starting, and was on such a high that I decided it fine to throw in some extra hills midway round, just to take in the scenery and give myself a few more slopes to bound down in the snow. I kept going for the full 20 miles, without having to stop and, despite the hilly terrain I'd chosen, managed to maintain the target pace of 8:08 min/mile. Very happy at the end of that one.

The following week saw me tackle the longest tempo run of the schedule so far, which I had to put in after a long day in the office and not much sleep the night before, due to unsettled children!

It was an 8 miler, with 6 of those at 7:05 min/mile pace. It's pretty much having to knock out a 43:30 10k in the middle of an 13k run. Considering the thought of breaking 45 minutes for a 10k was a pipe dream, little more than 3 years ago, you could say this felt like a reasonable challenge. I got through it, just, but couldn't wait for it to finish and collapsed into our porch way at the finish.

The high I'd been on the previous Saturday had seemingly ebbed away. I noticed this, even more so, when I had to tackle my shortest long run to date, a 13 miler, and had to pull up 4 or 5 times just to summon up the energy to finish it.

Sometimes it's like that. I've had an unsettled week sleep-wise, which is never going to help, and my meal the night before the long run was pizza. To top it off, the first 4 miles of my chosen route were into a headwind and uphill. Nevertheless, I'd hoped for more and it's knocked my confidence a little.

Here's my summary for the week:

Mon - 6x800m in 2:55 (1:30 RI)
Tue - 20 mile cycle commute
Wed - 6 mile @ 7:05 min/mile, 1 mile warm up/down; 20 min swim (intervals)
Thu - REST
Fri - REST
Sat - 13 miles @ 7:40 min/mile
Sun - 26 mile cycle, moderate hills

Totals: 52 miles; 6h30m

Sub-zero training

It had been a fairly bitter ride home on the scooter the night before, so I'd been expecting a nippy start to the Saturday. Sure enough, the low morning sun exposed the deep frost which had bitten the garden and my watch's thermometer revealed that the air temperature was a refreshing -4.9℃. It was most definitely a tights day.

A few years back, I wouldn't have been seen dead in tights, or lycra of any description but, since then, I've clearly become less image conscious and more rational and a sucker for comfort. They're eminently sensible for training in this sort of weather, especially for the pre-dawn and post-dusk hours, when you don't even get the mild benefit of the winter sun. Admittedly, your body can warm itself up quite quickly, but if you're only out for 30-45 minutes and intend on training relatively intensely throughout, you've got to give your muscles a chance to make it through the session in one piece. For the longer runs, you could argue that full tights aren't necessary and, despite Saturday's temperatures, I did feel, at times, a little too warm. That said, had I been forced to stop for any period of time, in the middle of nowhere and, let's face it, when you head out for a 2.5-3 hour run, anything could happen, I would have been glad not to have been facing being stuck in just my shorts.

Other items I pulled on for warmth yesterday included a long sleeve thermal icebreaker top, an additional running t-shirt, a Buff, to wear around my neck, a pair of running shorts over my tights, thickish smartwool running socks, cotton gloves and a fleecy running hat.

I always carry a lightweight backpack with me on long runs, to carry my water, a phone, some money, gels and cereal bars. There was a stark contrast between the temperature when running into a chilly Easterly in the shade, versus being sheltered from the wind and in full sun. Having the backpack to hand, meant I could remove, or put back on, hat, gloves, buff as required to regulate my temperature, keeping them within easy reach in the elasticated side pockets.

Saturday's run was an 18 miler at MP (target marathon pace) plus 45 seconds [per mile], it took me around 2h25m. I didn't find the pace too tough, although I had taken it a bit easier during the week, due to a slight injury (banging my knee on a kitchen unit!), so my energy levels were probably slightly higher than what they would have been. Nevertheless, 18 miles is still a long way and I was suitably exhausted at the end of my uphill finish and struggled to keep up with my children who'd come to meet me at the finish and were demanding piggy back rides and tree climbing! I think it's called a warm down...