Stages

The Venice marathon is eight weeks away. I am now six weeks into the fourteen week training plan I am following. I have got through the “oh my god, this is too overwhelming” phase, and am now firmly heading into the “jeez, I just wish the race was this weekend” part of marathon training. This of course, will be followed by the “please do not let me get injured at the last minute” period.

That “overwhelming” phase when I first started out training is something I have definitely gone through on every marathon training programme. When you look at the numbers on the plan, the long runs, the midweek runs, the ever increasing distance, it can be immediately off-putting. It is one thing to sign up and feel the euphoria of doing so, but when the training properly starts, this is undoubtedly where doubts creep in.

“the highs and lows”

Keeping those doubts at bay in those early days, and just gradually building things up has been important for me in the past, and remains so today. If you read last week’s blog, you would know that I have now become a bit more accustomed to the highs and lows of the training regime. When I signed up to my first marathon, my uncle, who had run a marathon in his younger days, told me one thing. “Do the training.” One of the best bits of advice I ever got one.

Now that you get into the training, it really is just about putting all your faith in it and trusting the results will come in the end. As I face up to a seventeen mile run in the morning, I have to trust that all my training so far will get me round. And even then, on the day itself, there are still nine more miles than that to go.

“changing things up”

But this week has been hugely positive. I have had a couple of 10km runs with my JogScotland group, which were hard but good, then my midweek run could not have been more of a contrast to the one where I struggled so badly last week. Eight miles on a really nice night just flew by. I decided to run in town, rather than the roads around my house, with which I am so familiar. Just changing things up, adding a bit of variety, running somewhere else can make such a difference to your attitude and make it feel a lot less of a slog to get up and get out I find.

Running a route from the beach to the West End and back

I am also beginning to see further gains, particularly, I think, through the introduction of the midweek run, to my overall fitness. Now perhaps this is just in my head, but as my head is as important as my body in the overall scheme of marathon running, this is crucially important. And having got through the “overwhelming” phase, it is also important to keep your head in a good place through the next part.

“how much more can you put yourself through?”

Autumn marathons are made through the months of July, August and September. The race itself may well be in October, but it is everything you do in these days that gets you there. And this is where the “wish the race was this weekend” phase kicks in. One thing I think I am bit guilty of is wishing my life away. Looking forward to something and wishing it was happening today, rather than focusing on the here and now. But I think in marathon training it is to do with that sense that you are running so much, how much more can you put yourself through? At least if the race was this weekend, then it would all be over, right?

These next few weeks are when things get really serious in terms of mileage. My last few weeks have been very consistent, and this week I will have already run pretty much a marathon distance in the course of the week, BEFORE, I get to my long run in the morning. This August, I have already run one hundred and thirty nine miles and there are still a few days to go, so I am going to hit in excess of one hundred and sixty I believe. And September will be very similar. But this is what you have to do, to put yourself through, to ensure you are ready for the big test. And even then, you still have no idea how it will go on the day itself.

“a marathon will find you out in the end”

I have always felt that the marathon is the race which tests you like no other. You can bluff your way through a 5k, or a 10k or probably even a half marathon, but a marathon will find you out in the end, particularly if you are not as well prepared as you can be. And it is this thought which will hopefully propel me through this “wish it was this weekend” phase. It is about appreciating the here and now; about recognising that each and every run is another stepping stone to that start line. It is about an acknowledgement of what you are capable of, and where you can find resolve and determination to get to the end of the next run, the end of the next week, the next milestone on the training plan.

Returning to the gains I mentioned earlier, I ran my fastest parkrun in a few years this week. Still some distance away from my all-time best, but I am not concerned about that, but as part of building confidence it is another of those milestones. In previous marathon training, I became very concerned that I was becoming very one-paced, running all my runs at the same pace. Focusing on parkrun as my hard run of the week, and running the long runs easy, adds a better balance to my overall training regime.

Adding some speed work into the plan

Cooler weather in recent days is also helping. Going back to the “overwhelming” stage, that certainly coincided with when the temperatures were at their highest back in July. Let’s hope now we are beginning to head towards some cooler days ahead. I would even really enjoy a run in the rain now, as it has been so long since I had one! As the temperatures in Venice are still routinely in the high 20s Celcius right now, I just need it to cool down a bit further there. Eight weeks to go.

Push It

It is Wednesday night. I am out on what is supposed to be an easy run. Taking it relaxed. Not putting any pressure on. Not aiming for a quick pace. Nice night. Flat route. Just about getting the miles in and another run on the training plan ticked off. And I am struggling.

I am struggling to control my breathing. My legs feel like they have lead weights around them. I feel that I am really having to push myself to keep going to the end. All the time I am thinking, “what on earth is going on? This is not supposed to be like this. This is not supposed to be this hard.” But it is. And I have no idea why.

The route ran along the banks of the River Don

The night before, it should have been harder. For the first time in a long while, I was leading out the JogScotland 10k group for their run. In recent months I have mostly been running with the 5.5 mile group and it is quite a step up in pace to move from there to 10k within an hour.

But the night before felt good. It was significantly cooler than it has been lately so that definitely helped, but during that run I did not feel particularly stressed or that I would not be able to keep up with those in the group who run it more regularly. And it came on the back of a quick parkrun at the weekend, getting back under twenty six minutes for the first time, and a pretty positive long run last weekend (more on that in a bit).

So why was Wednesday night so different? Why was this run on this night such a devil to get through? The truth is, it is simply the ups and downs of marathon training. There is no straight line to the start line. There are just some times, some days, some evenings, some mornings, when it is just, damn, hard.

I could not blame obstacles like this en route for my issues!

When I got back to my car at the end of it, I stopped and thought about it a bit. And I suddenly realised that I was not even breathing heavily. This was not a cardiovascular thing, this was not about lacking fitness, this was just about how my body and mind felt at that time, in that moment. I wrote last week about confidence, but more about resilience. It was resilience which got me through Wednesday night and it will be resilience which gets me through the other challenges the training plan will throw up.

My long run last weekend was one which had to be overcome. I wrote last week about deliberately making it hard, about choosing a route to test myself. And test me it did. Putting in a large hill after only a few miles into the run was meant to make it tough. I usually find the early miles the hardest ones to overcome, often feeling worse after three miles than I do after much longer distances, and so I had that challenge to face too. The hill itself was tough, but what it also did was mean I was very tired late on in the run, as I got beyond half marathon distance and also faced a three mile uphill route back home.

The big hills were hard

As I got beyond the thirteen mile mark, I thought “well, I hope my legs do not feel this bad in the actual race”. A valid point, here I was, barely at halfway to the ultimate goal, feeling not so great. What was encouraging though was that as I got towards fourteen and fifteen miles I actually began to feel better. My last mile was among my quickest, and that was going uphill. Challenge set. Challenge met. Move on to the next one.

That is the whole point. One bad run is not going to ruin things. One bad week is not going to ruin things. There are still nine weeks to go to the race. A lot is going to go right and a lot is going to go wrong between now and then. Not panicking about anything. Not getting too down when it does not go well. That will be important as the distance continues to climb.

One of my favourite spots to run, beside the River Dee

Ironically, the distance this week does not climb. This is what I call a down week; a week when the long run distance actually reduces, before increasing again next week. Part of the training programme to give you a bit of respite before going again.

This weekend, it is a half marathon distance which is on the plan. I am not quite at the stage yet where I think a half is a bit of a rest, but compared to sixteen, it is a lot less of a challenge (and I know that that probably also sounds a bit crazy, thirteen miles is a serious distance). After this weekend, we then head towards the high teens and twenty miles. But those weeks are still to come.

A final thought on resilience and overcoming challenges. A friend of mine sent me this picture this week. It is a picture of me from my first marathon, with about three hundred metres to go.

I look like the life has been sucked out of me

If you want to know how hard marathon running, I think you can see it writ large on every inch of my aching body. I do not actually remember feeling quite as bad a this picture makes it look, but I can assure you, at this point of the Stirling Marathon, the last thing on my mind was about doing another one.

But here I am four years on, training for marathon number five. You may call that madness. But I like to think it is resilient. If I can get through how I felt at that point, captured in full force in that image, I can get through more runs like I had on Wednesday night. Nine weeks to go.

In Your Head

Distance running is a mindset. Get that bit right, then a lot of the rest will also come.

As the distance of my long runs builds, some folk have said to me that they don’t understand how I can do it. They cannot wrap their head around doing the kind of distances you do in preparation to run a marathon. And to be honest, when you look at the stark numbers on a training plan, it is a bit unfathomable too.

Week upon week of running a long run of half marathon distance and more, just for one day of running twenty six point two miles. And that does not include all of the other, shorter runs which you do during the week. All of that combined together is daunting. And with the weather being so warm this week, it is more important than ever to be in a good frame of mind for running.

A beautiful night, but a bit hot for running

Before I ran my first marathon, I had no idea how things would go in my training plan. I decided to do one after running a 10k race (I had run a half marathon fifteen years earlier) so pretty much everything was a new experience. From running eight miles, then ten, then keeping going and keeping going. I vividly remember the first time I ran nineteen miles, it was such an awesome feeling that day. And the reason for that was, of course, a lot to do with my fitness improving through that time, but it was also because I had got my head sorted.

“resilience… is a key attribute”

Everything was going to be difficult and would be challenging, but as the distances built, then so did my confidence that this WAS something which I could actually do. And with the building of that confidence, then came resilience and I think this is a key attribute which has really helped me along the way. Working out – when you feel like your legs are going to fall off, or you are struggling to breathe as you head towards the top of some great big hill – that the pain will end, that you just need to keep going, that what you are going through is only temporary and you will feel better soon, was such a learning experience for me.

And with every milestone I passed, I found that confidence and resilience built. Every additional mile ran became an obstacle that I knew, if I faced it again, I could meet the challenge and go further. Now, I am not going to kid you here, when I stood on the start line of that marathon in Stirling in 2018, I had zero idea how things were going to go once I got beyond twenty two miles (the furthest I had run in training), and I struggled in those final miles, but it never once crossed my mind that I was not going to finish. And having finished, I knew that everything up to the marathon distance was something which was not going to phase me again.

“when I feel under pressure”

Getting my head around all of that was crucial. Recognising the achievement and storing the information deep inside me gave me a better understanding of me as a runner and me as a person. Through work I have gone through stressful times in the past and can now easily identify when I feel under pressure (and then do some things to perhaps alleviate that sense of nervousness or anxiety that builds in those circumstances). Without doubt, running is one of those coping mechanisms to break me away from the other pressures of life.

The other thing about that first marathon was that it also gave me a scale of what I could put up with (or to be grammatically correct “up with which I could put”) – it gave me a scale of hard. And every hard race I have ever had has given me a scale of hard. Whether it was on a hot day in Barcelona, or on a cold morning at Aberdeen parkrun, or on an autumn day in Glasgow, ever one teaches you more about yourself. I know on a run when things are hard, and I know that I can get through it.

“train hard, run easy”

That does not mean I do not still have nerves, of course I do. As I sit here writing this, I have just planned out a sixteen mile run I am going to do tomorrow that includes running over one of the biggest hills here in Aberdeen,so I am a bit anxious about that. You may also think, “well, hang on, why bother setting yourself that challenge?”. Not unreasonable to ask, but for me, this is about setting myself the target to overcome. The other thing is, the course for the Venice Marathon is flat, so why run over a large hill? Train hard, run easy was a great phrase I heard someone use, so that is what I am going to do.

I am going to run it at a slow pace -as I have said before, this is about time on feet – and it is simply one of those milestones to pass. Last October I ran the Manchester Marathon, and one thing about that was really weird. Not the race itself, which was a bit hotter than I had anticipated, but the training. Now what is weird is that I can barely remember any of the training last summer (other than one seventeen mile run where I really struggled). I did not run over any of the big hills in Aberdeen which I had done in previous years, I did not do as much mileage as I had done in previous years, so this time round I want to make sure I do everything I can to get through the experience in Venice in the best shape possible.

The run tomorrow will be a solo one – in contrast to a race which I did with friends last weekend. With four others, I took part in the Railway Relay – a near twenty seven mile route between the towns of Peterhead and Ellon here in the North East of Scotland. It followed the route of the old railway line which used to run between them, which has now been converted into a running/walking and cycling route. Each of us – myself, Jeanette, Mark and Sally – would run a leg of the race before handing over to one of the others, while the rest of us piled into a car with our friend Amy who was driving, to get to the next handover spot.

With the medals at the end

It was a fun event to do, though the most stressful part was not the actual running, but was the navigating between the relay handover points. We had a couple of occasions where a bit of google maps assistance was needed to get us back on track, but thankfully we always got to the handover point in time and we certainly enjoyed the food and a drink at the end!

Still on events, I also got my medal this week from the distance event which I was taking part in throughout July. Run Around the World is a virtual team event, where teams attempt to run the distance equivalent to the distance around the world (more than 24,000 miles in case you wondered). While this year no one team managed it in the month, the medals have come out, and the challenge continues, and it is now pretty tight between a couple of teams to see who gets there first!

The Run Around the World Medals are always a nice design

Returning to my main theme then, the importance of your head in running (as opposed to those other key components, your legs), I am going to finish with another quote which I saw this week from the writer and runner, Michael D’Aulerio. “If you keep your feet moving forward, the finish line eventually arrives. This is a method which has never failed once.” Tomorrow, my head will keep telling the rest of me to keep moving forward. Ten weeks to go.

Positive

If you want to finish a marathon, run thirty five miles a week. If you want to finish well, run forty five miles. Now that may seem harsh and simplistic, but these words, which I read when training for my first marathon, have always really stuck with me.

Marathon training can be about far more than raw distance of course. Cross-training, swimming, strength training, hill repeats, sprint sessions, fartlek runs and much, much more can all go into it and play a part. But for me, the simplicity of that statement really cuts through a lot of the complicated stuff you can get bogged down in when it comes to preparing for such a huge challenge.

“it can seem immense”

Being simply overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, particularly when you start out training, is definitely something which I have experienced. You look at the training plan, the sheer amount of time which you have to dedicate in order to get ready for the big day itself, and it can seem immense. So that is why it is really important simply to focus on the straightforward stuff. It is this week’s schedule or it is the next run that is important, nothing else. Still being many weeks away from actual race day – though it is closing in frighteningly fast – it is just about focusing on what the next step of the journey is going to be.

Since my last blog, my training plans have been disrupted. Not because of injury or anything bad, simply because I have been off on holiday for a couple of weeks. Though we have not gone abroad this year, we did do a fair amount of traveling around Scotland and enjoyed fantastic weather and glorious scenery on many of the days. But it does mean that training has to fit in around life. I always say that I am a hobby runner. It is part of what I do, but it is not all that I do. It is important to me, of course, but it needs to move around and be flexible to accommodate other things we may be doing.

A perfect morning for a run in Glasgow when on holiday

So while I have a training plan and will do my best to stick to it, I am not going to stress if I miss out a run or have to move things around. For example, a Sunday is usually my go to day for my long runs, but recently we have had family things on, so my long run had to be done on a Friday for example, or this weekend, on Saturday. Not being too rigid with the plan is another way of just relaxing about the challenge and not getting too up tight too soon. There is plenty to be stressed about when we get to the actual race day itself!

What I am really looking for now is consistency and gradual improvement and additional miles each week. Being back at work – and back at home – has given a bit more of a routine to things. Two runs with my JogScotland group and a longer midweek run (seven miles this week), with rest days on Monday and Friday will be my routine for the next few months until the Venice Marathon as much as possible. I already know there will be some weeks where this is not going to work out, due to work commitments, but that is ok. I will be making sure I get my long runs done as that is where the miles really now begin to build.

Enjoying the scenery a bit closer to home

Between now and the marathon itself, every week (other than the final long training run) involves a run which is a half marathon distance or more. Remember what I said about the danger of becoming overwhelmed when you look at what is ahead. This is what I mean about thinking about that and allowing that kind of stat to just get in your head and mess around a bit. So there is no point in thinking about the fourth week of September and going, “how am I going to do that twenty mile run?”. It has to be about, “what is the plan for this week? How can I build on the progress I have already made?”.

“everything felt a bit aimless”

And I really believe I am beginning to see progress. Any regular readers will know that this year has been a bit blighted with injuries, doubts about my running, concerns about my weight and body image. I have struggled at times. But now, I feel more positive. And I think it is because the training plan – and the target of the marathon – is giving my running much more purpose. Earlier in the year, everything felt a bit aimless. It was not pointless, but there was very little purpose to what I was doing. It was going through the motions. But now, while it is still up and down and never perfect, it does feel like there is a definitive way forward.

This has been the first week where the long run has gone further than a half marathon distance. I really think when you begin to do this, and particularly when you go beyond fifteen miles on a run (approximately 24km) you get in what I call the big miles. Now fifteen miles is a long way, but you always need to remember, that there are still another eleven point two on top of that to get to the end of the marathon itself, which is a seriously long way. But getting to fifteen miles has always felt like a milestone to me. Then there will be eighteen, then nineteen, then twenty. It is all just building.

“great preparation”

After already running about eighteen miles during the week, I went out this Saturday to do my fifteen mile run, feeling really positive about it. Cooler weather certainly helped, but also going out with a mindset about running it easy. Taking off any time pressure or pace pressure and really focusing on time on feet. Being out on a run for a long time – and for the majority of this run I was going to be on my own – is great preparation. Not just physically, but also mentally. I also planned this run so that I would finish off the last three miles at my local parkrun.

Cloudy skies, a little breeze and cooler temperaturs

I ran a route I have run before (after four marathons it is kind of hard to find new routes from your front door!) and it just felt good, almost the whole way round. Psychologically, because I knew I was finishing at parkrun (a friend was going to run the last few miles with me and then give me a lift home) I knew I did not have a three mile hill to face at the end of my long run. That definitely helped, and should also help with the Venice course, as it is predominantly flat.

So to get through the run, tick another milestone off the list, move on to the next challenge, and to feel so positive about the experience is such a contrast o so many other runs I have had this year. Now like I say, not every run is great. Running is just hard, it simply is, and I know that I could be sitting here next week, after a long run on a hot day, bemoaning things. But the positivity of this week will be stored in my head, ready to be brought out on those tough days to help me through them. And for now, that is good enough for me. This week’s mileage total, with six or seven miles planned tomorrow? Thirty three miles. I am getting there…..