Half way there

Day:        42

Distance: 19.6km

Time:       1:57:00 secs

Calories:  1,553

It's the end of Week 6 of the training plan and this tablet of stone which I have been blindly following has gone a bit vague.

Up until today the plan has been very specific - it's "30 mins steady" here and "45 mins easy off-road/hilly" there - but all it says today is "10 mile or half marathon race". No mention of tempo and, more surprisingly, a choice between two different distances. For the sake of clarity a half marathon is 13.1 miles, which is 31% further than the other suggested distance. That's quite a difference.

To run 10 miles the week after I ran 12 miles seems somewhat counter intuitive, so I opt to follow the same route that I took this time last week. This time I was joined by Jim who will be running a half marathon in exactly 5 weeks, so it's good training for both of us.

It has been decidedly cold all week long, so it was a nice surprise to step outside today and be greeted by blinding sunlight. That's not to say that it was a hot day (it wasn't), but it was perfect weather for running. The cold helped to keep me cool and the sunshine made it feel like a real pleasure to be outside and in green spaces like Brockwell Park. I wouldn't complain if the weather was like this on the day of the actual London Marathon.

So, as I've already mentioned this run concludes the sixth week of the training plan. That means that I'm now halfway through the 12 week plan and I'm pleased to report that I'm still enjoying the training. I had thought that it was going to be a real chore. I had heard many marathon runners talking about how it takes over your life and, to an extent, I can see that as you need to put a lot of time and effort in each and every week. For example, this week I've trained on five out of the seven days and have committed nearly 5 hours to training. However, I'm managing to fit this training around the rest of my life and my wife isn't yet complaining about becoming a "marathon widow" so I wouldn't say that it's completely taken over my life. That said, whilst I'm writing this I'm also looking at the upcoming weeks and the ever increasing time commitments - so maybe I'll have changed my mind in a few weeks time.

One thing that is helping me to keep going (other than the running playlist and my desire to achieve my stated aim of completing the marathon in 3:40) is all the kind donations that I've already received on my JustGiving page. I only sent the link out on Tuesday and I'm already 27% of the way to my target of £1,000. A massive thank you to everyone who has already sponsored me and for those who would like to help me get a little closer to my target please visit http://www.justgiving.com/Darren-Yaxley-marathon. 

Early dawning, Sunday morning

Day:         21
Distance: 16.82 km
Time:       1:44:31 secs
Calories:  1,278

What are the first things that come to mind when one thinks of Sundays? Lie ins? Check. Recovering from hangovers? Check. A roast dinner? Check. A 17 km run? Er ... not normally, but then this is turning out to be anything but a normal January.

I again went running with my mate Jim on a route that he had devised called the "3 Parks Run", so called because it takes advantage of the expanses of greenery that can be found in our corner of London; Peckham Rye Park, Brockwell Park and Dulwich Park. The route made for a really picturesque run and it was a real pleasure to run on a lovely, sunny January morning. It became less of a pleasure around the 14 kilometre mark as my legs were on fire when they realised they hadn't run this far since the half marathon I ran in March 2010. I'm hoping they feel OK tomorrow as I'm meant to be going for a 35 minute jog after work and I don't fancy slapping the Vindaloo strength Deep Heat on again.

This is now the end of my third week of training, so it's worth doing a quick audit. In this week I have covered more than 39 kilometres, run for just over 4 hours and burnt off 3,076 calories. It all sounds good until I remember that on April 17th I'll need to cover a longer distance (42.195 km) in a similar amount of time and I won't have the benefit of being able to stretch it over an entire week. Oh yeah, and I read in a timely supplement that came with the Guardian yesterday that "To lose one pound of weight in a week, the body must burn 3,500 calories more than it consumes" so all this effort won't even have resulted in any weight loss ...

To leave on a happier note and to return to the Sunday theme where this post started, I'd like to leave you with a couple of songs inspired by Sundays. Neither of these are on my running playlist, but both came to mind whilst out running today.