So it's the end of training week 3 and I have started to consciously watch what i'm eating - not gone back onto weightwatchers diety-ness (yet) but I have started to make sure I get enough of the right things and limiting a lot more of the less useful things (crisps, chocolate, bread etc) and it seems to have made a big impact on my skin, my attitude and my general health - I feel a lot more with it than I did this time last week so I just need to keep it up.
Now cardiotrainer decided to abandon me after mile 5 of my run this morning but i'm certain than I ran more than 7 anyway as I ran all the way into work and I planned it on walkit.com and I did a slightly longer route than that. But the split for my second mile was actually under 10 minutes (9.53 to be exact) nad none of the others were over 10.40 which whilst it isn't exactly fast is far better than the 11 minuters that I managed to clock up on one of my runs this week.
So my speed is starting to creep up, on the treadmill I managed an entire KM at 11kmph which was hard to say the least but it shows that the speed is in my legs somewhere. The challenge this week has definitely been with motivation - not helped particularly by my ankle going over in the first thursday netball game, it put off my friday morning run until friday evening and subsequently put my Saturday morning onto this morning - which was - for anyone that didn't notice - HOT.
I did get some smeggy big blisters this morning so it's definitely time to look at a new pair of trainers and some decent running socks that aren't going to kill my feet. The best ones i've found so far are karimor but they aren't great - the nike ones I tried are terrible so I won't be getting those again.
The lesson in the marathon book for this week was about singlemindedness re: training - don't let anything else get to you - if you're running the distances you need to be running then that's great - whether you're losing weight or not, whether you're making the times you want or not, that stuff doesn't matter. The most important thing is completing the runs and making sure you feel comfortable, and ibuprofen is a good way of making sure that you recover quickly, the runs stay relatively painless and the inflamed bits don't stay inflamed for long.
Onto next week!
Sunday 26 June 2011
Sunday 19 June 2011
Week 2
Well I think it's safe to say that the things i've heard about proper nutrition while running has hit home this week.
By Wednesday I was feeling lethargic, lacking energy and feeling like I was about to fall asleep at any point and felt utterly fatigued. With the help of a co-worker I realised that the lack of energy was probably due to complete lack of Iron in my diet for about 2 months. I'm not planning on starting to take supplements or anything like that but I did go home and eat a steak and open a bottle of red wine.
I also had a big think about other nutritional issues - i've been steadily gaining a few lbs each month and it needs to stop and indeed come off - I promised myself that i'd be more careful with my weight and so far it hasn't happened since I stopped weightwatchers - so i'm going to go back to the saturday morning class from next month and i'm going to keep a careful watch on eating 3 balanced meals a day again, portion control, 5 fruit and veg's a day and only snacking on fruit and vegetables.
That being said i've decided to take it really easy this weekend as stress has certainly been a big part of feeling crappy over the last few weeks so I didn't train on Saturday as planned but I did help Elliot move out, which, as it works out, was quite a work out. I'm going to train as normal next week and just hope that gradually the weight falls off and the diet changes help my energy levels.
Other than that training was fine.
The only other thing that i'm thinking about at the moment is sleep and how much/little i'm getting. I need to be a bit more organised in terms of lunch preparation and getting myself to bed and chilled out at a reasonable time. It's stuff that requires more thought but I feel like i'm making the starting steps OK at the moment so I just need to make sure I stick to it.
Hopefully next week will be a bit more balanced.
By Wednesday I was feeling lethargic, lacking energy and feeling like I was about to fall asleep at any point and felt utterly fatigued. With the help of a co-worker I realised that the lack of energy was probably due to complete lack of Iron in my diet for about 2 months. I'm not planning on starting to take supplements or anything like that but I did go home and eat a steak and open a bottle of red wine.
I also had a big think about other nutritional issues - i've been steadily gaining a few lbs each month and it needs to stop and indeed come off - I promised myself that i'd be more careful with my weight and so far it hasn't happened since I stopped weightwatchers - so i'm going to go back to the saturday morning class from next month and i'm going to keep a careful watch on eating 3 balanced meals a day again, portion control, 5 fruit and veg's a day and only snacking on fruit and vegetables.
That being said i've decided to take it really easy this weekend as stress has certainly been a big part of feeling crappy over the last few weeks so I didn't train on Saturday as planned but I did help Elliot move out, which, as it works out, was quite a work out. I'm going to train as normal next week and just hope that gradually the weight falls off and the diet changes help my energy levels.
Other than that training was fine.
The only other thing that i'm thinking about at the moment is sleep and how much/little i'm getting. I need to be a bit more organised in terms of lunch preparation and getting myself to bed and chilled out at a reasonable time. It's stuff that requires more thought but I feel like i'm making the starting steps OK at the moment so I just need to make sure I stick to it.
Hopefully next week will be a bit more balanced.
Saturday 11 June 2011
First week of marathon training
So this was the first week of Marathon training - I found a runners world plan for running in under 4.5 hours which I was going to follow, but IMHO it's a bit overcomplicated - I simplified it and thought i'd give it a go and it has been tough to fit into my lifestyle but I've done it for the first week. This being said I don't want to overtrain and injure myself, this will be my first marathon and I will have the option to do more and having started to read the non-runner's marathon trainer (recommended to me by Tim who has run several marathons) and my attitude has changed somewhat.
There is basically 1 chapter per training week covered in the book with other topics bridged at suitable intervals. It's a 4 day per week plan as opposed to the 5 day per week plan that I thought i'd be following and concentrates on the distances as opposed to intervals, hills, stride days, certain paces etc. So the first reason i'm changing plans is quite simply that it suits me better. The second reason is the success rate on the course that this program ran. 200 marathon runners starting from scratch - 199 made it, the only one that failed didn't follow the appropriate hydration advice. Can't say fairer than that.
So i'm a stubborn bugger and having written it up on my whiteboard I thought i'd better stick to what i'd written!
So this is what I did:
Monday 10km/6 miles (+ spinning)
Tuesday 5km/3 miles (+body pump)
Wednesday 50 minute run (was supposed to be an hour but I was waylaid and didn't want to miss yoga)
Thursday Rest (otherwise known as 3 games of netball!)
Friday: 4 miles (I worked it out in KM but can't remember what it was meant to be) and then a teensy bit of Body attack but to be honest by this stage my legs were fatigued and I was already worried about the Saturday run so I decided to leave early and go to work (which is still manic).
Saturday: 8 mile run - until this morning I was talking myself out of it in my head but I decided to do this as a trial run from my house to the office. I got quite lost at one point and ended up heading towards Hommerton - apparently road signs aren't particularly prevalent in Hackey - must be something to do with the cab licence ;) Still - I made it in - with the detour it was about 9 miles - without the detour it's more like 8.
Special thanks today go to the nice security man at work who let me in to get my waterproof jacket just after it had started to rain (despite the fact that I had no pass and fairly pathetic ID) and also to lovely Janine at the gym who kindly offered to comp me a private locker whilst i'm training so that I can run into work a few days a week as part of the training. My time wasn't great today due to the getting lost, pausing to look at my phone's GPS (thank you HTC) and generally not knowing the route and needing to keep an eye out for road names, but it wasn't too tough on my legs, I ended up walking another couple of miles after the running ended and I've actually done it which I feared I wouldn't.
So in Summary - it was a hard week of training but I did it - I'm actually going to change down to the lower intensity training plan next week to make sure that I don't end up overtraining and I feel pleased with myself for both making it through and finding the way to work which was quite daunting.
I read the first chapter of the book and there are a few things I got out of it that I would like to comment on:
1. Don't set time goals for your first marathon
Well - I've already done that - I've said i'd like to do it in 4.5 hours and it's going to take a bit of a change in mindset to overcome that. I'm still going to keep this as an aim but not the primary goal and it's not something that i'm going to deliberately train for any more. I'm 27 years old and I have plenty of time to sign up for more marathons if that's what I decide I want to do and once I've completed my first one I can start aiming for improving my times. The logic in the book is that completeing a marathon on it's own is a massive achievement - why diminish that feeling if you miss your goal time by a few minutes - you don't want to come out of it feeling negative. And it's right - I don't. I'm going to keep it simple and hope that my speed improves naturally but i'm also going to accept that completing the marathon is massive.
2. Even if you've run further in the past (and I have) keep to the timetable fairly rigidly - it'll soon step up the distance.
This is going to be tough for me but there's an account from someone on the course in the book who was in the same position and it said that later on through the training program it became obvious why. Now I'm not in the best position to do this having already done a week of pretty hardcore training but I'm going to go back a step and take this guy at his word and hope that it all becomes apparent to me as well.
3. Trust the book's training plan (or words to that effect):
As a natural cynic I feel that this might be the most challenging aspect of all! It has lots of personal accounts from people of all ages, shapes, sizes, backgrounds and levels of running experience and is written my someone fairly cynical so I'm going to try to follow it carefully and accept that their experience is far superior to my own and that I should shelve my natural desire to disagree!
4. Create your own vision:
It's basically Positive Mental Attitude. If you visualise yourself doing it, and tell lots of people you're doing it - then really the rest of it is (borrowing a phrase I learnt from Huw on Kili) left foot, right foot, body follows. Big things break down into little things - little things are achievable.
5. Expect the pain, the sickness, the emotion and anything else that comes up.
The people that run the course told the participants to adopt a "run with me" technique...i.e. "oh hello pain, I was expecting you, come run with me" as opposed to "oh shit, i'm in a lot of pain, what do I do now?!" which will lead to stopping or slowing down. It's logical to expect pain, emotion and sickness and unless it's an injury there is no reason it will stop you from doing what you set out to do. When I read this it reminded me of Kili, it's the same over-emotional, fatigue induced mental anguish that brings me close to tears and I've come to thing of it as the bitter-sweet emotion that comes with triumph and achievement - I'm just going to embrace it.
So all in all a challenging week - but a good week.
There is basically 1 chapter per training week covered in the book with other topics bridged at suitable intervals. It's a 4 day per week plan as opposed to the 5 day per week plan that I thought i'd be following and concentrates on the distances as opposed to intervals, hills, stride days, certain paces etc. So the first reason i'm changing plans is quite simply that it suits me better. The second reason is the success rate on the course that this program ran. 200 marathon runners starting from scratch - 199 made it, the only one that failed didn't follow the appropriate hydration advice. Can't say fairer than that.
So i'm a stubborn bugger and having written it up on my whiteboard I thought i'd better stick to what i'd written!
So this is what I did:
Monday 10km/6 miles (+ spinning)
Tuesday 5km/3 miles (+body pump)
Wednesday 50 minute run (was supposed to be an hour but I was waylaid and didn't want to miss yoga)
Thursday Rest (otherwise known as 3 games of netball!)
Friday: 4 miles (I worked it out in KM but can't remember what it was meant to be) and then a teensy bit of Body attack but to be honest by this stage my legs were fatigued and I was already worried about the Saturday run so I decided to leave early and go to work (which is still manic).
Saturday: 8 mile run - until this morning I was talking myself out of it in my head but I decided to do this as a trial run from my house to the office. I got quite lost at one point and ended up heading towards Hommerton - apparently road signs aren't particularly prevalent in Hackey - must be something to do with the cab licence ;) Still - I made it in - with the detour it was about 9 miles - without the detour it's more like 8.
Special thanks today go to the nice security man at work who let me in to get my waterproof jacket just after it had started to rain (despite the fact that I had no pass and fairly pathetic ID) and also to lovely Janine at the gym who kindly offered to comp me a private locker whilst i'm training so that I can run into work a few days a week as part of the training. My time wasn't great today due to the getting lost, pausing to look at my phone's GPS (thank you HTC) and generally not knowing the route and needing to keep an eye out for road names, but it wasn't too tough on my legs, I ended up walking another couple of miles after the running ended and I've actually done it which I feared I wouldn't.
So in Summary - it was a hard week of training but I did it - I'm actually going to change down to the lower intensity training plan next week to make sure that I don't end up overtraining and I feel pleased with myself for both making it through and finding the way to work which was quite daunting.
I read the first chapter of the book and there are a few things I got out of it that I would like to comment on:
1. Don't set time goals for your first marathon
Well - I've already done that - I've said i'd like to do it in 4.5 hours and it's going to take a bit of a change in mindset to overcome that. I'm still going to keep this as an aim but not the primary goal and it's not something that i'm going to deliberately train for any more. I'm 27 years old and I have plenty of time to sign up for more marathons if that's what I decide I want to do and once I've completed my first one I can start aiming for improving my times. The logic in the book is that completeing a marathon on it's own is a massive achievement - why diminish that feeling if you miss your goal time by a few minutes - you don't want to come out of it feeling negative. And it's right - I don't. I'm going to keep it simple and hope that my speed improves naturally but i'm also going to accept that completing the marathon is massive.
2. Even if you've run further in the past (and I have) keep to the timetable fairly rigidly - it'll soon step up the distance.
This is going to be tough for me but there's an account from someone on the course in the book who was in the same position and it said that later on through the training program it became obvious why. Now I'm not in the best position to do this having already done a week of pretty hardcore training but I'm going to go back a step and take this guy at his word and hope that it all becomes apparent to me as well.
3. Trust the book's training plan (or words to that effect):
As a natural cynic I feel that this might be the most challenging aspect of all! It has lots of personal accounts from people of all ages, shapes, sizes, backgrounds and levels of running experience and is written my someone fairly cynical so I'm going to try to follow it carefully and accept that their experience is far superior to my own and that I should shelve my natural desire to disagree!
4. Create your own vision:
It's basically Positive Mental Attitude. If you visualise yourself doing it, and tell lots of people you're doing it - then really the rest of it is (borrowing a phrase I learnt from Huw on Kili) left foot, right foot, body follows. Big things break down into little things - little things are achievable.
5. Expect the pain, the sickness, the emotion and anything else that comes up.
The people that run the course told the participants to adopt a "run with me" technique...i.e. "oh hello pain, I was expecting you, come run with me" as opposed to "oh shit, i'm in a lot of pain, what do I do now?!" which will lead to stopping or slowing down. It's logical to expect pain, emotion and sickness and unless it's an injury there is no reason it will stop you from doing what you set out to do. When I read this it reminded me of Kili, it's the same over-emotional, fatigue induced mental anguish that brings me close to tears and I've come to thing of it as the bitter-sweet emotion that comes with triumph and achievement - I'm just going to embrace it.
So all in all a challenging week - but a good week.
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