Training....

After the pain of missing the marathon and the weeks of injury it was important to learn the lessons from the injury, and I hope I have. From what I have read on the internet and what I've been told tendonitis is mainly an overuse injury, if a guy has it in his wrist there is a fair chance he's been choking too many chickens. In my case it seems I was doing too many miles on hard ground, my PB half marathon and the lack of a good rest afterwards was the tipping point, my leg said it couldn't take any more.

The lesson I've learnt is that I have to mix up my training, add in different activities so that different parts of my body pick some of the slack. Before the injury I stopped playing football, using my bike, swimming, trekking, all so that I could focus on my running. It is easy to do, if you download almost any marathon or half-marathon training programme there is no space for anything but running, you focus on the weekly mileage which leaves no energy for anything else. Then when you do pick up an injury and miss a couple of weeks of training there is no mention in these training programs of where you should start when you get back, so with the aim of getting your long run close to a full marathon you do more miles than before you got injured, putting even more pressure on your body.

I'm taking the main principals from internet training plans, namely:

• Gradually building up my Sunday morning long run until I'm comfortable running 20+ miles about 3-4 weeks before D-day.
• Tapering in the last couple of weeks, so I'm feeling strong on race day.
• Occasional training sessions running up hills and doing speedwork. 

And the differences, cross-training, flexibility and reliance on my own common sense rather than a one size fits all program. I'm not suggesting for a moment that I know more than the coaches and experienced runners writing training programs, just that I want a training program that fits around me and not me fitting around it, and that's impossible unless I do it my own way. We'll see how it works out!

Why blog?

In October 2008 I learnt that I had been lucky enough to win a ballot place in the London marathon 2009 at the first time of asking. At that point I'd been running regularly for almost a year and having completed two half-marathons I was looking forward to the prospect of testing myself over 26.2 miles (42.2 km).

The training program started in earnest almost immediately, after a couple of setbacks things appeared to be on track in the first couple of months of 2009, a half two minutes off my PB in January was a good sign, while as the training went on I seemed to be getting stronger. This showed when I ran another half at the beginning of March, just six weeks before D-day I knocked almost a minute from my half-marathon PB (1:32:06).

But this was when things took a turn for the worse. Two days later I went out for a training run, I was aiming for 10 miles. As soon as I started I felt pain in my right shin, but I thought it was one of those things that would just fade away once I ran a couple of miles. I ran six miles with the pain growing and growing until I could go on no longer. I walked/limped the remaining four miles home just thinking it was a severe cramp, a delayed response to the half marathon.

I rested for a week, couldn't run, another week, still couldn't run, went to the Doctor who told me it was a tendonitis and to take anti-imflamatories for at least two weeks and to rest completely, which would leave just two weeks to the marathon. At that point I was thinking it would be very difficult to do the marathon with the big hole in my training, but that I would give it a good go.

However, it turned out it wasn't to be, the two weeks passed and still I couldn't run. For the last two weeks before the marathon I went to bed hoping I would wake up the next day ready to run, but it didn't happen. I went to London and watched the race pass me by, it wasn't my year.

But I could look forward to 2010, I deferred my place, which I can only do once, so 2010 has to be the year. After the ups and ultimate down of preparations for 2009 and with my injury problems now behind me (touch wood), I wanted to keep a record of the ups and downs of 2010 so that others can know exactly what it took to get me to the finish line on 25th April 2010.