Race report

Hi everyone,

I realise I've rather neglected this blog, sorry about that. There's a good reason for it though - I started a new job, bizarrely back at Lehman Brothers, but now working for the Administrators. I won't go into details as it's all boring accountant stuff.

So here I am, two days from my second race and I haven't even reported on the first race! Obviously, I finished, but importantly did way better than I expected. My original goal when I started training was simply to finish - I'd never run that far in my life, so just getting over the line was an acheivement.

As the big day approached, thanks largely to being pushed by my training partner Iain Clark (more on him later) I realised that I could hope to do considerably better than just finishing. Iain encouraged me to do 10K training runs much earlier in my training schedule than I'd planned, and by the time the race rolled round I realised the challenge was to crack one hour. That meant running at a average pace under 10 minutes per mile, something that I really struggled to do. In my best training run I managed the 10K in one hour and 2 minutes, and felt like death.

On the day the excitement of the event carried me through and I finished in 55 minutes 55 seconds, prodly running in my royal blue Catholic Association polo shirt! For that stunning success I have to thank Iain again, my pace-setter, even though he unsportingly sped off in the last 500 m to finish 11 seconds ahead of me. I also have to thank JoJo for ferrying me to and from the race, bullying me to train, and generally being supportive and wonderful.

After the race I was exhausted, but still capable of moving about and talking, which was a bonus. I also got a shiny medal (see my facebook profile picture) and a bag of sports drinks. The atmosphere was great, the organisation of the race only marred by some delays in getting the timing chips read and results uploaded to the website. The whole thing was organised by 2:09 Events, and was really enjoyable. Race report and official results are here: http://www.209events.com/event.php?event=90

I left the Brooklands venue incredibly pleased with myself and the result, but also knowing that I had to stay ambitious. I now knew that six 10Ks wasn't enough of a challenge. But where to go from here? That's the subject of my next post.

In the meantime, please go and donate lots of money on my website:
https://www.bmycharity.com/V2/60kmtoLourdes
I'm over £350 including offline donations, but I'd really like to get over the £500 mark!

Uncomfortably Numb

Oh wow. This is going to hurt.
I just came off the treadmill after running four miles, for the second time in two days. I ached all over this morning, so it was a real effort to climb onto that machine today.
I felt OK when I started, but once I hit my old friendly 30 minute mark I started to feel it again. Suddenly I was very aware of my breathing, the acid in my legs, balancing even starts becoming conscious. It's official, I still hate running.
Right now I'm just feeling a bit numb. There's no pain, but I feel like it's waiting for me, and I'm going to stiffen up completely over the next 12 hours. Oh well, no one said it would be easy.
I know there's quite a few runners in my network, so if you've got any recovery tips I'd really like to hear them!

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Training begins and a reality check

Hello everyone, and thanks for the messages on Blogger and Facebook. This journal is going to be on both sites at the same time - isn't Web two-point-oh great?
After spending the weekend sitting in a chair in a hotel function room looking at powerpoint slides I decided I had to run today, no excuses. What made me feel more determined is I weighed myself and I'm in even worse shape than I thought. Apparently three months without serious exercise plus Christmas has taken it's toll, and I'm topping out over 112kg. That's 17 stone 9 in old money.
At the moment my training is just running on the treadmill in my living room while watching TV. It's a nice way to get into it - it's really discouraging to be pounding the pavements when you feel like you're going at tortoise pace and you know you look like you're about to have a coronary. Also you have to guess how far you've gone and how much further there is to go, you have to stop to cross roads and you have to deal with different slopes and surfaces, as well as pedestrians, cyclists, dogs...
Basically, on a treadmill you can just plod away and rack up the miles, getting used to running constantly for as long as you need to, and you've got the TV to distract you. Obviously I'll have to start road-running before the first race, but for now I'm just working on getting my basic level of fitness up where it needs to be.
At the moment my limit is pretty much 30 minutes, in which time I cover about 2 miles. That's probably worth about 340 calories, so not bad, but I tend to hit the wall pretty soon after the 30 minute mark, so I really need to improve if I'm going to survive a full 10K- at my current pace that will take more than an hour and a half.
However, while I know I've got to get better, I'm consoling myself with the memory of not being able to run for ten minutes at a time, only a few years ago. And I was a bit lighter then! I started off running for ten minutes and wanting to die, but I did it three or four times a week, and pretty soon it wasn't that bad. So I upped it to fifteen minutes eventually, and kept going progressively like that. It sounds simple, but it took months to get to the point where I could run for a whole half hour!
So that's the general plan with the training - up the distance gradually, and try increase the speed too.
Of course, if I have less weight to carry around, the running will be easier and faster, so I'm going to have to start looking seriously at my diet soon. Everyone who knows me knows I love to eat, especially the bad stuff. I'm not averse to a bit of salad or veg, but given the choice I'll usually go for meat and pasta, or a sandwich. This is going to be hard, so if you've got any tips that have worked for you, please leave a message below, I'll really be interested in hearing what you have to say.

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