14 weeks left, 1st marathon distance run since last race and a new found fondness for layers

I really enjoyed my running for the most part this week. While I had shyed away from doing the longer midweek runs last week, this was not an option this week with having a marathon distance to cover over the weekend, I knew I would definitely need a rest day before.

I started the week with a 5.4 mile run on Tuesday then upped my daily mileage to 7.5 for Wednesday and Thursday. These were all quite comfortable and I didn’t feel the cold as much due to having at least 2 layers on throughout each run. I even stretched to 3 for my upper body for the one on Thursday evening!

There is a vegetarian ultra runner called Matt Frazier who’s blog I have followed for a good few years now, (one of his inspired me to start writing mine) he has gone from being a middle of the pack marathon runner to qualifying for the Boston Marathon with a sub 3:10 time. He then went on to do 50 and 100 mile Ultras. In one of his blogs a few years ago, he mentioned a Tony Robbins quote

The idea behind this is if you have decided to make a change or set a goal which will require some change of how you have done things previously, you cannot “leave yourself an out” and sort of keep the goal to yourself so you can pretend you never tried if you fail. Or to put it more bluntly, you cannot keep the boats to get off the island to how you were before.

The fact this new training plan has higher weekly mileage than I have done before means there will be a certain amount of boat burning required of me! Even though I’ve ran a competitive marathon in the past when the weather has been like this, I’d never ran 26.2 miles on my own out in the street with only salted peanuts and a water bottle for company, until yesterday!

Using some basic maths bonding, I had decided to do 2 laps of my 7.5 mile loop, a 0.4 mile looped detour and then 2 of the usual 5.4 mile loops to make up 26.2.

I found the first part of this quite manageable and settled into a comfort zone for the first bit with the 7.5 mile loops. I had planned to reward myself with the salted peanuts after I had finished the 0.4 mile detour as I would be over half way there. I found the salt quite refreshing and it was nice to have a change from the usual bars I take round with me. I only had about ¼ of the bag and a small amount of my water. I used to take a lot more water on board but have become a bit worried about hyponatremia. This is essentially overhydration where people don’t have any salts or electrolytes with their water and the body cannot process it at the rate they are drinking so it can have a similar effect to drowning!

I was at no risk of this today as I only had about 300ml whilst I was out. The second part of this run was more challenging and I had to remind myself about boat burning to get through it. I think if I had managed to run this distance on my own before, I may have struggled more on the last lap as a lot of my motivation came from it being the first time.

I finished the week again with a 6.4 mile run with my friend Paddy. This wasn’t as arctic as the day before and we managed to maintain a comfortable pace throughout. After we had finished we did a 10 minute walk as a warm down. We then had some warm cherry and plum pies with a hot drink which felt like a fair remuneration for our morning efforts.