Week 4 Session 2 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

Week 4 Session 2 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details - link to course and stats

Updated training plan. Please feel free to download a copy and customise for yourself! This is taken from Sam Murphy's 'Marathon from start to finish', which I linked to in an earlier post. She has 6 full programmes based on how much time you can realistically devote to training and how hard you think you can push yourself. I think this is 'Ideal World', easier.  Stuff in green I am doing because I chose to.  Stuff in red is the actual programme to complete training for the London Marathon next year, i.e. 'must do'.

Charting in Google docs is utter rubbish.  Even when I did it properly, locally in Excel and uploaded, docs was unable to cope.  So I'll be uploading charts as follows after each run.

Session by Session - showing time spent, distance covered and pace (mins per mile).

Total Distance - I am intrigued to know how far I go in preparation for and on the big day, overall

Total Time - ditto how much of my life disappears while I'm doing it

Enough geekery.  I did the same session today as last time, but over a different course.  Although I always start outside my house and finish almost back here, meaning overall the elevation gain/loss is effectively 0, I seemed to spend more time running uphill this time.  This appears to be reflected in the distance I covered and the average pace.

Two things I really hate when running - hills and headwinds.  Both pretty much unavoidable when you live on the downs within spitting distance of the ocean.  Hills really make my bosoms, which I'm depressed to have to admit to having these days, hurt.  And headwinds are just unfair.  I barely move at the best of times, but into a headwind you need stop-motion cameras and 3 days to see any progress at all.  This also applies when I'm cycling.  Given that after my next marathon I want to try a triathlon, this is not all that encouraging!  I think it's the Hever Castle triathlon today and I really think I will be giving that a go next year.

Provided I can do another run tomorrow, I'm back on track for sticking to my plan!  I wasn't actually planning on running today, I was supposed to be enjoying my 40th birthday present - a blast round a track in a Lamborghini Murcielago.  But a case of identity theft saw the session rebooked for a different date, at a venue I have no hope of getting to, by someone apparently called Lee Colegate from Peterborough.  Sorted out now, but very annoying and stressful and not really how I wanted to spend my day off yesterday.  I booked this long weekend to really get the most out of the drive and have some proper fun and it's all gone wrong.

Hey ho, I can watch the Grand Prix instead and I still have Monday to waste in front of the Wii.

Week 4 Session 1 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

Week 4 Session 1 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details - link to course details, splits, etc.

So, yes, I missed an entire week out. But I looked at the planned session in the training plan for today. I hate Google docs for spreadsheets, by the way, but you can't preview it online which I imagine you might want to if you bother following the link unless I upload it in that format. Will see if I can work out how charting works properly - I'd like to track my pace over time as well as my distance, although I imagine I may need to add sheets and collate data apart from the main plan to get anything remotely useful.

Anyway, today's run - 1 minute walk, 4 minutes run, 5 times. 25 minutes total. How hard can it be, right? The answer in fact is very, very. I hit a hilly circuit I don't normally brave until much later when the plan actually requires me to do hill running, which might not have been the wisest idea. But I've just visited a periodontist who's advised me I need 7 teeth removed, possibly 4 more, which I will have to get done by an NHS dentist (I'm not currently registered with one) for whatever it is they charge these days and spend about £600 having deep cleans done, potentially having to have more teeth removed if this doesn't kill off the infection. All caused by smoking - FAMILY PLEASE TAKE NOTE, ESPECIALLY THE SMOKERS AMONG YOU, MAY BE WORTH GETTING YOURSELVES CHECKED OUT - which puts more pressure on the whole quitting thing and makes it harder. And I was charged £150 for the news. I have to say, actually, she was a lovely woman and I'd recommend her unhesitatingly.

Anyway, got home a little freaked out and also in a certain amount of pain from all the prodding. Prodding which elicited her saying high numbers (bad) and also using the word 'pus' more frequently than I consider either polite or necessary.

I need to do everything I can to stimulate my circulation to prevent further deterioration - the damage already done is irreversible - so off I went on the hard (for me) run, on the hard (for me) course. It nearly killed me. While my overall pace for the session was improved versus previous runs, this is mainly due to the fact that I spent more of the session 'running' than on those earlier ones. My actual running pace was slower. You can see this if you follow the link right at the start of the post, if you care enough. Probably not helped by a fairly smoke-filled weekend and couple of days in the office, which I'm finding a slightly unpleasant place to be right now. Possibly shouldn't say that in the public domain, but hey ho.

And either 4 minutes is longer than I remember (not ruling out early onset wossname here) or I cover more ground in 4 minutes than I remember (ditto, and also clearly not the case).

I have to do this run once more this week, before again increasing the proportion of running in the week's 'hard' run.

Fingers crossed things improve.

Must re-read the important bits of Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking again this evening. It really did stick there, for a few weeks, but now it needs to be permanent. If I wasn't going to be spending so much on my damned gob in the next few months, I would look up a hypnotherapist, but for now, it's all down to me! So that should go well.

So, here's the plan!

http://bit.ly/marathon-training-plan

Buggered if I know whether the link will work, but anyone who cares please let me know if you cannot see the thing.  Good news is, there's plenty of breathing room before I actually have to be training in earnest.  I've bunged in the rest of the getting-to-30-minutes sessions starting next week and then there are about 10 weeks before the programme kicks off properly.  So I've reproduced the first 10 weeks of the programme.

Stuff in green is really kind of optional, stuff in red means it needs to be taken seriously and is part of the schedule leading up to 22 April - the date of the London marathon 2012.  I have taken the programme from Sam Murphy's excellent 'Marathon from start to finish'.  I notice in Amazon she's released an update in 2009 which now also covers half marathons as separate discipline.  AND she's done one on Triathlons, too, which is where I think I'm going next.  The old knees won't take many more miles and there are some nice local triathlons, by all accounts.

I can say with some confidence that I won't do a lot of what's in this plan.  But I will be conscientious about recording what I do and sharing in case anyone out there is in the same boat and needs to know they're not suffering alone.  I'll try to keep it upbeat and amusing - you can read old entries to see if you think I've been successful on that in the past!

Week 2 final session by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

Week 2 final session by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

In case it wasn't clear, by the way, these links at the top of the post (not the post title, just below that) take you through to maps showing exactly where I went on each run.  All very 'big brother' but geeky and fun at the same time.  When I start to whine about hills (and I will, trust me), you will be able to check whether they are in fact mountains or molehills.  And so on.

So I went out first thing this morning, expecting the weather to be getting progressively worse during the day and meaning I'd be less likely to bother, the longer I left it. Wrong! Was blowy as hell when I was out and now it's bright sunshine!

Whatever, this is the first time in many months that I've actually done 2 runs on consecutive days and I am feeling capable of cracking on with the full training programme. I'm choosing to assume I will get place in the London marathon next year via the ballot. There's no way I can commit to raising the kinds of minimum amount a lot of charities need to give you one of their guaranteed places and last time I took one and fell short it cost me a fortune.

If I don't I believe paying will guarantee me a place in Brighton's marathon, which is the week before. So there won't need to be too much fiddling with the training plan. I'm going to edit 2010's plan working back from next year's big day to see if I actually need to have started already on the main programme, or whether I can spend a bit more time on the preliminary build-up stuff, which is what I'm doing now. It's basically about getting to a level of fitness where I can confidently run for 30 minutes non-stop and I'm nowhere near there!

Week 2 Session 2 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

Week 2 Session 2 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

Horrendous weather they have threatened us with has yet to materialise, so I really had no excuse whatsoever not to drag myself round today. Pedometer appears not to have bothered recording the first 2 minutes' worth of walking, which is a bit of a bugger. I'm trying to see a progression here not just based on practice but also on a healthier lifestyle. I may have quit smoking to protect my teeth, but I am expecting to see other side benefits, dammit. A reduction in weeblishness being one of them.

If I can get out again tomorrow, I'll pretty much be back in shape to be doing a week's worth of sessions in a week, starting next week. You gotta have goals, right?

I also found my marathon training timetable from 2010, which I'm going to edit based on getting into the London marathon next year. Giving people visibility on what I should be doing wil allow them to shame me into doing it if they see me slacking. :-)

Week 2 Session 1 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

Week 2 Session 1 by leecolgate at Garmin Connect - Details

I know, I know. Week 2 is separated from week 1 by a matter of two whole months. Nevertheless, we're back in business and indeed this is the first of what I hope and intend will be many nicotine-free runs. But let's not get too carried away about that just yet.

Planning to go out again tomorrow.