For the last 10 weeks or so I have been building up to running the marathon at the Dorset leg of the Endurance Life coastal trail running series. This meant getting back into a decent amount of training with the additional long term arrangement of doing this alongside full time work.
On Saturday 6th December I raced my first trial marathon finishing 4th in 4'00'17 which was not quite the end of the year I was looking for but was a day for a lot of learning abut myself and racing. Racing over marathon distance on the road controlling the demands on my body can be done with relative ease, however this was a whole lot more difficult on trail. In the early part of the race I ran with a club team mate which was great to get the the early miles out the way, but going on to the more undulating parts of the course it became a whole different ball game. Feeling like I was just about holding my position I trekked over the steep climbs at one point producing nearly a 14 min/mile but pushed through to about mile 20 in 2nd position and then the fun started. Firstly having to stop to answer a call of nature, a very spectacular location but is hindsight maybe wasn't that urgent and then nearly bonking in a cabbage patch (not a funny as it sounds, running speak for feeling really trash and nearly fainting). At this point I slowed to take on some food and water but this was probably wasn't the greatest idea as I could barely digest what I had eaten. This then led to me slowing over the closing miles and being overtaken twice (I only found out at the finish thought it was runners in the half marathon event, although don't think I could have done much to keep up with the eventual 2nd place finisher). I was finally overtaken on the closing 1/4 mile or so on the beach but did not realize again, this I maybe could have done something about if I was a bit more switched on.
This block of training has really been a transition from student life, to the real world which is very much inevitable but was tougher than I expected. The main challenges I found was the amount of mental tiredness from concentration at work leading to feeling physically tired and the hospital bugs which you pick up when working. This lead to me feeling rather chesty and pretty awful at times, but managed to keep doing some training even if it was just running the 2 miles to and home from work.
Well on to the next races with the first big one being London Marathon and then 2 months later is Mont Blanc Marathon. The thought of the these races and the next 7 months or so makes is exciting, the variety of being in a big city marathon one week and then a few weeks later being partway up a mountain is so cool. I am making some changes to my training firstly introducing lighter weeks routinely to try to let my body recover and fight infection avoiding the big drop in weekly mileage and missing key sessions. Also speeding more time running in the Quantock Hills to get in some more accent and decent as well as weekly key marathon sessions on a Tuesday and a Thursday morning tempo session hopefully on the local track.
Here are some totals from this block of training:
625 miles,
72 hrs
