Furthermore

London Marathon

Fantastic news this week - I'm in next year's London Marathon. I've wanted to do this for a long time, but the amount of training has always put me off. Ironically, now I have two children, I have less time to run in than when I was single and lived in Blackheath (where the race starts), but what the hey.

Moments after the initial elation come the doubts about whether you can actually do it. Fortunately, I had read about this book:

which sounded ideal for me - I think I saw it on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. A quick Amazon later and I'm reading it.

Jeff's method, in short, is that you have to run and walk from the start. There's a lot more to it than that, but the idea is to stop your legs getting so fatigued. Also you run the full distance before the day itself, so you don't have a "wall" to hit.

The program is really for 26 weeks, but I only have 20 till the race, so I started at week 6 of a 4 hour time program to see if I could do it. Today was to run 11 miles. I got round okay - the run walk thing really works well. He also recommends short, low steps, and eating while you go. Anyway, it's by far the longest run I've done recently, and my knee problem didn't bother me, so I'm sold so far.

In the coming week I'm supposed to do two 40-50 minute runs on Tuesday and Friday + a 30 minute run on Wednesday. I'm thinking I can do the longer ones by running to work (although it's a bit further than is ideal and it means I have to use the godawful buses to get home). The short one maybe I can do at lunchtime, but I may just have to drop it this week as I'm not sure how I'm going to fit it in really.

I'll try to blog what I've done against the program, and how I think I'm going to do. I'm hoping for about a four hour time, but my run today suggests more like 4.30 - 4.40. Still, early days.

Posted by MFreestone at December 4, 2005 08:12 PM