In just over 14 weeks time, I will be toeing the line at my first marathon, in London. That’s right, debuting with a nice small race…
As someone embarking on a marathon adventure for the first time, I figured it would be well worth documenting my training in weekly blogs. In these posts I will give an honest and truthful diary of my progress over the previous week of running, together with the key lessons learned.
This bumper first edition will cover almost 3 weeks: from my start to 2020 up until Sunday 19th Jan.
It’s been a troubled start to the campaign – a tale of highs, lows, and one motivated, but ultimately dumb, runner.
1st Jan. 2020. A brand new year, a new decade. I woke up on New Year’s Day feeling pretty seedy, probably (certainly) from the beers the night before. One potential new year’s resolution bouncing around my head the past few days is to ‘do some exercise every single day’. Well, that didn’t survive first contact.
2nd Jan. Time to make up for yesterday’s laziness. I only had an hour to get out the door and get a run in before we had to check out of the Airbnb. Naturally, it had to be a classic Aussie bush run on incredible hilly tracks complete with hundreds of roaming kangaroos. Incredible, yes, but very different to the surfaces and terrain that I am used to running on at home. I was keen to make amends for yesterday and was feeling pretty good, so I gave it a nudge on the uphills and let the hills do the work on the downs. That’ll make up for it…
Or not.
3rd Jan. After flying from Melbourne to Sydney last night, I woke up this morning with an unfamiliar pain in my foot that exacerbated as I flexed it through the motion of walking. Damn. Definitely seems like it will be no running for me today. “That really was a stupid new year’s resolution wasn’t it”… Most worrying though, was that my symptoms aligned perfectly with a stress fracture of the third metatarsal in my right foot.
3 days exploring Sydney on foot probably not the best remedy then, but what can you do when you’ve got opera houses to view.
5th-10th Jan. Time to get out of the city and catch a flight up to the Sunshine Coast. The decision to fly straight up instead of road tripping was made in part due to the injury and the knowledge that I could at least hire a road bike for a week up in Noosa. Five awesome days of cycling in Queensland did go some way to alleviate the frustrations of not being able to run, but it wasn’t the training I had planned to be doing 15 weeks out from London. No complaints though, the riding around Noosa was beautiful and I jumped on with a bunchie leaving town at 6am every morning of the week – insane! Not often that I manage 50k’s before 7.30am!
15th Jan. It’s been a long 2 weeks without any running, but finally my foot feels normal to walk on again. Just in time, then, to run the annual Fleet Air Arm cross-country championships – a race that I had marked down in the calendar for a while as a ‘B’ target. Of course, I had read many an article saying to ‘take it easy’ for at least a few weeks when coming back from injury. Perhaps patience is not my forte.
The race went terrible, obviously, and I felt horrendous the entire way around the muddy 10km course. But the foot held up okay, I’ll take the small victories. What I had not prepared myself for was the shear soreness that transcends my body after two weeks of zero running. The kind of soreness that you get after your first gym session in months? You know it.
16th Jan. Finally then, I was back running. Eager as ever, I headed to the track in the morning to drag my aching body around a few laps. By my pre-injury standards, I had a very straight forward session planned: 10x200m at 5k pace with 600m easy between each rep. In hindsight, with my body already sore from yesterday’s race, I would have been much better off listening to the sensations and heading out the door for some easy miles.
18th Jan. A Saturday. Yesterday my body was too tired to even consider running – instead I elected for a ‘sweetspot’ session on the Wattbike. Plan for today was to head to the local parkrun with my Dad, the sole aim being to cover the course at a very steady pace. Now, I love a parkrun, but this morning I discovered that my discipline – in terms of forcing myself to run slow when others around me are not – is simply terrible. Clearly I knew that I just needed to bank some easy miles to get the body used to running again, but put me in a group of people vying for the win? Just as before, too tempted.
Once again plunging my body into a world of soreness, I felt another unfamiliar pain, this time in my Achilles. Three sessions of fast running in a row off the back of a two week layoff. Let’s just say, pretty embarrassing that I let it happen.
At least I learnt something though: control your environment. Me being me, the easiest way to not get dragged into racing when I shouldn’t be is to not turn up at the race to begin with. Next time, when it’s time to do some easy miles, I simply won’t head to Parkrun! Caveat: you may have more self-control.
Lesson of the week
Patience. Running is a sport that cannot be won overnight. You can’t go chasing it. It’s the consistency over the weeks, months and years that will bring about the results in the long term, what you do today is just one tiny rung on the ladder towards results.
Injuries are, to a point, inevitable in this sport. But it’s often in those moments when we are in two minds whether to push through or back it off that most injuries occur. When you find yourself in this situation, separate your thought processes into two camps: the inner athlete and the inner coach. What is it that is calling for you to back it off? Always follow the advice of your inner, rational, coach.
Duathlon Dan 