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.