march training summary

this month included the taper towards my first marathon and, right at the end of the month, the actual race. despite that i managed to do my highest mileage yet.

distance: 145.6miles (235.0km)
time: 17hours 40minutes 29seconds
runs: 10 easy, 3 long, 3 tempo, 1 race

finished my first marathon!

just got back from anjo marathon. am so happy because i ran really well and finished in 2 hours 40 minutes 45 seconds. that was almost 20 minutes faster than my aim of 3 hours!

i also won, which made it even better of course! now my legs feel suitably tired, but i am feeling really good!

thanks to rie, rich & hal, ben & touko and finally peyton for coming to support. the cheering kept me going, as did rie's drinks and peyton's mad dash to get me some pocari! i'll never forget my marathon debut!

a blast from the past

i was trying to find the contact details for someone i used to run with at university and i happened to find a page which is for old members of the oxford university cross-country club. at the bottom of that page was a photo that nearly brought tears to my eyes. in case you can't be sure, i am the blond thing in the middle, number 31, holding a bottle of champagne. it is the victorious men's team from the 1998 varsity cross-country match. also in the photo are evan fountain (number 29) who was my mentor and the team captain and nick talbot (number 33) who helped me through my physiology finals. brought back some great memories. in case you are wondering why it is dark, this event is a true cross-country race. it is run in the middle of december, in the cold and rain, through mud and rivers and over a long course. it was probably the hardest race i even ran but definitely one of the most rewarding and proud moments of my life. brilliant.

trying to taper

at the moment i am in the second week of my taper. what's that? well, apparently it is a really good idea to start running less and less in the three weeks before a marathon. i have followed some advice from the 'runner's world' website which has lots of good articles about training and so on.

my biggest mileage week was just under 50 miles. so last week i dropped it down to about 40 miles. more important than distance covered was the fact that i tried to run a little slower than normal. i had one run of about 6 miles at my marathon race pace, but all the others were about one and a half to two minutes per mile slower. well, that was the idea. but it is not that easy to run slower after running at the same pace for the past couple of months! my watch was very useful in telling me if i was going too fast, but i prefer to trust my body and how i feel. recently i have been feeling really good and often find at the end of a run that i ran a little faster than my plan. so i have tried taking more days off and that seems to help too. this week i will probably only run four times and will total no more than 30 miles. i will try to keep all my runs nice and slow, perhaps with a couple of miles at race pace in one run.

what's the point of a taper? well, i will be trying to run over 26 miles at a decent pace. so the main point is to let my muscles recover from training and to keep my body and all its systems at 100%. there is no point training hard now as it is unlikely to take any time off my marathon. instead it would probably make me more tired. i have to trust in the training i have done and in my mental strength to help me run through the hard parts of the marathon! and of course i know that rie will be there to cheer me on when i want to die!

am really looking forward to the anjo marathon now. have done some research and found out that it is run on a cycle path, but that they do not close the path. so there will be some walkers and cyclists and i might also have to pause for some red lights. might sound strange, but i think it will be a nice low-key introduction to the marathon for me!

nagoya international women's marathon

rie and i headed out to watch the nagoya international women's marathon yesterday and we were rewarded with a great race and a great result. rie's colleague from tsukuba university, fujinaga-san, won and will now be going to the world championships in berlin. it was her first marathon and she won by running a controlled race, coming from behind at around the 37km mark and winning comfortably in the end in a time of 2 hours 28 minutes 13 seconds. very fast. it was also the last race for crowd-favourite and former olympic champion takahashi-san (more famously known as Qchan). took a couple of photos on my phone:

Qchan

Fujinaga-san

it was so cool watching all the runners come in. it gave me some inspiration for my marathon debut at the end of this month, but also some fear after seeing some of these high-class runners really struggling at the end of the race. it's a long way! but as rie said, "it's your first marathon so whatever happens it will be a personal best!". nice, i love my wife!