When reading my first blog entry, some of the more observant amongst you will have noticed that there was mention of summer.  The decision to run the marathon was made in mid-September and as such the next few entries will be a “catch up” of the training so far…

…So, the running had begun and it had become very apparent that, if I was going to transport myself 26.2 miles without the use of some form of powered vehicle, I was going to need to do a lot of training!  I began the process of sifting through the thousands of “advice” articles on the internet, finally calling a halt to this process when an article informed me that “running a marathon is hard work”…a shocking revelation!

However, after many hours of avoiding running by sitting on the sofa finding advice on training, a few common themes arose.  Some I already knew, such as the need for a high carbohydrate diet.  What I didn’t know was that Jelly Babies, Jaffa Cakes and Fig Rolls are good sources of carbohydrates…cue a trip to the shops to buy as many Jelly Babies and Jaffa Cakes as I could: the Fig rolls had sadly run out (or maybe I didn’t look as hard for those).  With my new diet planned, although not entirely revolving around sweets, I just had to plan my runs.  Again there was a huge number of training plans online but the gist of them was a need for a mix of shorter runs, interval and speed training and a longer run each week.  Finally the only thing left to do was actually start running.

Over the next few weeks, I started running three or four times a week, mainly just trying to get into running, work on the distances a little and try and work on my fitness a lot!

The other nugget of information that I found was that if you do a lot of running you will need to eat more…something I was more than happy to follow, but it did make a huge difference to my energy levels.  Running the same distance on a day when I hadn’t eaten a good amount was infinitely harder than on a day when I had eaten a sensible amount – that is not to say that running that distance was anything other than hard work on any day though!

The distances increased from 3 miles, to 5 miles, to 9 miles over these weeks, more from learning what to eat and how to pace myself than a huge increase in fitness.  As a novice runner, I was very much learning as I went, using some of my Physio knowledge and some trial and error!