Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Undulating my legs off

The last couple of weeks before a marathon are usually spent tapering - reducing training load significantly in order to give your body a chance to be nicely recovered in time for the race. A popular rule of thumb is that it takes a fortnight for training to have an effect, so running yourself in the ground in the last days before a marathon is not going to help much.

This is quite nice from my point of view, as it means my feet have a chance to stop aching and finish healing up the blisters which appeared during the massive spike of training I've done over the past couple of weeks. The effect even of this relatively small amount of training has been noticeable, though. Last Sunday I found myself lining up for the Alton 10 - ten miles of constant uppy-downiness in the depths of Hampshire. The course is definitely "undulating" in that I don't remember any actual flat sections - it consists largely of long, shallow uphill sections and steep downhills. Even the start is downhill - and as it's in the same place, the finish is uphill. I redeemed myself fairly well, finishing in just under 1:13 - not bad for me over that distance - and felt a lot better afterwards than I have done after a lot of longer runs before.

Hopefully this means that I've been able to build at least a little bit more endurance. 42km doesn't seem like quite so infinite a distance as it did even a few months ago, and I'm reasonably confident that I can at least think about finishing Copenhagen. A run round behind the 4-hour pacemakers for most of the course still seems likely - with my lack of preparation, most race strategies other than "go off at a maintainable pace and hold that until you finish" aren't available to me. And anyway, finishers at Copenhagen get hot chocolate in the repatriation area rather than unpleasant sports drinks. How's that for civilised? If it's good hot chocolate, that's something I'd definitely run 26 miles for.

Things could still change, though. We shall see.