
A great Christmas for family, food and presents, less good for weight and training – but that’s OK, it’s Christmas.
After eating my own weight in chocolate and with no exercise since the 23rd, I just tipped over 71kg (156.5lb) – the heaviest I’ve been since I don’t know when (actually that’s a lie, I expect it was since exactly a year ago … I’m a serial offender at this).
After the 8 hour round trip to collect my father before Christmas, Thursday saw a 6 hour trip to take him back. The traffic was even worse, but a shorter trip because my brother-in-law drove some of the way to meet us and we played relay batons with my father. It was great to have him with us over Christmas – it made it even more special for all of us.
When I ran my first marathon in 1998 I set a training goal of running a half marathon by the end of January. I remember going out late on a cold and wet 31st January evening to get it done.
Nearly 21 years later I’m planning to run my third marathon – in Rotterdam on 7th April 2019 – and thought it would be a good idea to run the half marathon distance before the end of December.
I ran with our younger son on Friday and we clocked up 21.3km (13.2 miles – although his phone app recorded 0.4 mile further). That’s the furthest I’ve run since my second and last marathon in April 1999!
It went pretty well running at about 30 seconds a kilometre outside 4 hour marathon pace (perhaps a bit faster than it should have been for a long slow run but, at 26, I don’t think Alex runs any slower). That’s despite me carrying the equivalent of another 6 bags of sugar compared to how I plan to be next April.
Slightly sore quads after the run, but not too much of an issue. The consequences for the Achilles tendons have been more worrying – hobbling around for the rest of the day and a very sore right Achilles the day after. Certainly two steps back there, after some encouraging progress recently.
By Sunday, the legs were recovering – still a bit of ache in the quads and soreness in the right Achilles, but better.
I must do some thinking as to what I did differently with the 13 miles on Friday, after which I’ve struggled, compared to Sunday’s 11 miles, after which I was fine. Clearly, I cannot take any liberties with the stretching, compression, warming up and down, etc.
With Sunday lunch with friends I’ve decided to finish the week’s training, such as it has been!
Happy New Year to everyone.
Week | Run | Cycle | X-train |
1 | 16.1m (25.9km) | 9.8m (15.8 km) | 2:00 |
2 | 18.5m (29.8km) | 13.3m (21.5km) | 2:00 |
3 | 20.7m (33.25km) | 65.8m (105.9km) | 1:00 |
4 | 22.2m (35.8km) | 13.7m (22.07km) | 1:00 |
5 | 24m (38.6km) | 13m (21km) | 1:00 |
6 (Christmas) | 13.2m (21.3km) | ||
‘Running’ totals | 114.7m (184.7km) | 115.5m (186.3km) | 7:00 |