Ten days to the London marathon now! I’m pretty relaxed about it now but I had some hard times as I was not able to train for two weeks due to an illness and only got back to it this Monday. Nevertheless my first 5k run on Monday went surprisingly well so I am confident that I will get around just fine, even if not fast. It is a good thing that we have a very generous cut off time of 8 hours.

Marathons are not a walk in a park but the sense of achievement is addictive, and being part of such an iconic race as London is very special and frankly, I can’t wait for the day to come! This year it is even more special for me because my sister will be here to support me. My sis is now also a runner (I am taking full credit for that J) and she did her first race just few weeks ago in Bratislava as part of the Bratislava marathon festival. I made her company and also ran the half-marathon the next day. I surprisingly still haven’t run the full marathon in my hometown although I registered few years back….but my training didn’t really go according to the plan plus it was snowing on the day and the temperature outside read -5C, conditions I was not used to, so I was glad to miss it. But it is on my list.

I am also strongly leaning towards running the Helsinki marathon in August this year but will definitely decide only after London. Singapore marathon in December is also still on the list though I am bit perplexed by their ban on chewing gums. This creates bit of an issue for me as I am addicted to chewing gums almost as badly as I’m addicted to coffee….

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     For me personally, a long run is anything over 90 minutes though if I train for a marathon it increases to two hours. They are important because your body needs to get familiar with the feeling of fatigue and they are a building block to your endurance. They are very rarely fun, at least for me. I find long training runs hard. That is partly the reason why I try to sign up to as many races as I can during a marathon training. To have the support of the crowd and the company of other runners makes a lot of difference. Even if the races are de facto just training runs. The goal is not to achieve a new PB – they are about practicing my pace, I am testing the gear and planning the nutrition for the marathon day. And they are way more fun than running on my own.

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     I’m from a metric country so getting used to the imperial units took some time.  Weights and volumes are still pretty much a mystery to me but I think I can say I’m bilingual when it comes to miles and kilometres. Sometimes I prefer one, sometimes the other. It’s less miles than kilometres and the kilometres are going faster than miles even if the distance is the same. You know it’s just 26 miles compared to 42 km in a marathon 🙂

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     No matter what you are trying to achieve, be it your first 5k or a first marathon, important thing is to enjoy yourself. Don’t do something you find tedious. I ran the Reading half marathon on 22nd March and it was the best race I’ve done so far. Yes, even better than the London Marathon! The organisation was superb, the route was great, the crowds were amazing, there was live music and bands, weather was unbelievable favourable to us and I found myself enjoying the whole day. There was no PB for me – nowhere near actually, I was off by seven minutes, but I really didn’t care or mind. I finished the run into the Madejski stadium with a smile on my face and made it my mission to recruit whole bunch of people to run this race in 2016. If you are thinking about running a half next year – do this one.

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NB

Also it’s my mum’s birthday today!

      Every training program out there will tell you that adding a hill session to your schedule is a really good idea. I have only recently come to terms with hills. For a long time, I was avoiding them as they sounded as too much work – and really, I only ever signed up for flat races anyway. But. In a very strange way, hills started to become fun. You know, here and there a sneaky incline or a bridge breaking the monotonous flatness. I live in central London so inclines and bridges are pretty much all I get but you can work with these. I did couple of Kenyan hills workouts at the pedestrian subway at Waterloo which was surprisingly empty compared to the rush hour craziness around the station. Also laps around the IMAX cinema made for a nice break between the intervals. I was quite lucky there wasn’t a film premier though.

And the best thing about a hills session is that there is always a downhill section.

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   To tell you the truth, I was undecided on ‘G’ for a while. Gym is logically the first thing that usually pops in people’s mind when it comes to exercise or running and I thought I will go for it as it is so logical – pros and cons of running on treadmill versus running outside etc. (I definitely prefer running outside but I like the control when running on a treadmill – I just thought I might as well mention it.)

However me being me, the first thing that popped into my head when I started thinking about these daily posts, notably ‘G’ was a goodie bag. I guess I am bit materialistic. I just love them. You never know what you get. There is always bottle of water and an energy bar – which is super useful after a race, and a clean and most importantly dry t-shirt. Yes, there are lot of flyers, leaflets and samples that may not necessary be of interest but I love the surprise! The best goodie bag I received was from the London marathon (in 2012) – not only we got one after the race, we got one before as well! And it had a can of ale in it. Enough said.

What I am annoyed about is that sometimes the products are very ‘manly’. I mean, I like the smell of 24 hour deep dive deodorant but not necessary on me. If you stick a male deodorant in the bag, give something to the ladies too….or keep it unisex. Women are more and more signing up and running races – I believe they form around 40% of the runners nowadays – and we deserve to be noticed.

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   I’ve touched down a little bit on this in my last post – you need fuel, energy to keep you going when you train. I try to get most of the energy from what I eat and from getting decent amount of sleep. I aim to get at least eight hours of sleep when I’m training; even 30 minutes longer sleep than usual makes a big difference.

When it comes to energy on the go, everyone is little different and is good to experiment and find out what suits you best. Generally, for a run up to an hour I don’t take anything else with me but water. For longer runs of around 90-120 minutes I will mix an electrolyte drink and for anything over two hours I’ll have gels and water. I have noticed that if I run in the morning, I am quite often hungry so I’ve started carrying energy bars or jelly beans with me. Personally, I much prefer running after work or at lunch time and my long ‘morning’ Sunday runs very rarely start before 11am, unless it’s a race. Surprisingly I have no problem with getting up early for that; I did a 28km race starting at 7am last year and loved it.

If you are training for a marathon or half-marathon, find what works for you when you are out and about as realising that some gels give you stomach cramps on the race day is not something I would wish you to experience.

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