17 weeks to go, 6 training runs and a redemptive story as motivation  

This week was pretty fluent as far as my recovery weeks tend to go. I managed to cover 36 miles in 6 outings and never really felt I was stretching myself on any of them. I have learnt from several marathon training build ups that I can put too much into the sessions before and feel run down by the day of the race. Having every 4th week as a recovery week in this plan should reduce the risk of that happening at the end of May.

I found out midweek that my uncle in law Tim had signed up fo running the London marathon this year. He had ran the Yorkshire Warrior obstacle race with me the last 2 years and we volunteered together at the Yorkshire marathon last October. I think that experience probably contributed to him deciding to enter because it showed the people who finish marathons aren’t all elite athletes. I advised him to try to build up his long training run to about 20 mile and not worry about his midweek stuff as long as they weren’t all 3 mile runs.

In keeping with my tendency to not follow my own advice, my shorter runs this week were all 4-5 miles. If I’m advising him to not do 3 mile runs because they will be too short for a 42km race, it’s a bit of a non sequitur for me to do 4-5 mile runs for a 100km race!

I did 4 miles on Tuesday and a lap of my usual 5.4 mile loop on Wednesday. The 4 miles I did on Thursday morning were quite pleasant as I managed to get into a sort of flow on the treadmill which continued nicely into the 4 miles I did on Friday evening.

I returned to the 5.4 mile loop on Saturday morning and the weather was more Spring-like than I can remember recently.

I can usually grab some motivational material from the Players’ Tribune website most weeks. Ironically the articles I tend to enjoy more are from sports I don’t watch. There is something satisfying about building your knowledge of a sport based on how someone reflects on their experience of it. This week’s article was from a sport I’ve followed religiously since I was about 10 years old (NFL).

The article was by Michael Vick, the former Philadelphia Eagles and Atlanta Falcons quarterback. He was a childhood hero of mine and I can remember being devastated when he was sent to prison for organising dogfighting rings. This was a short account of what the city of Atlanta as well as the Falcons team and fans meant to him during the time he was in prison and how the one thing he still identified as was being their quarterback. He also mentioned about the ceremony recently Atlanta had to commemorate the last regular season game to be played at their stadium and how proud he was to be invited to the event as a special guest along with other former players. There was the usual “mobs” lobbying for him to not be allowed to take part but I was pleased they did not bow down to that request.

The final outing of this week was a lap of the 7.5 mile loop near me and then a short drive across the city to do 6 miles covering 3 laps of a lake in Roundhay Park with my friend Paddy. We parked at the top entrance and it was a good finish to run half a mile all uphill back to the car.

It will be a good challenge next Sunday to try get back up to 22 miles as my long training run. Having ran marathons as my last 2 races this should take me to a place I haven’t been in a while. Hopefully this will be a good progression towards the 30+ mile outing this plan peaks at.

There is a link to the Players’ tribune article if you click on the blog header.