Getting started.

I’ve been a runner since I was 16 years old, having been inspired by watching the rangy David Rudisha of Kenya lope to an 800m world record of 1:40.91 in the 2012 Olympic final.  I had always done a bit of running, but considered the competitive side of the sport (aside from a charity 5k outing – 22.22 – as a 13 year old) beyond me, the preserve of champions and serious athletes.  Somewhat paradoxically, watching the best of the world elite tear up the track and roads of London in July and August 2012 showed me that I could have a go.  Since then, I hate to imagine the number of hours I have spent poring over results, watching races on TV and online, and of course going back into the archives of YouTube to find races from Great Britain’s middle-distance glory days of the 1980s (courtesy of two chaps called Steve and a Tory MP, among others).  

For the five years from 2012 to 2017, I was utterly convinced that I was going to run 1500m races as my bread and butter until I was at least in my late 20s, and even the thought of running a marathon seemed absurd.  But as the result of a storm of circumstances which could never have been predicted, I find myself now living at moderate altitude, with a plethora of runnable off-road trails to train on and enough free hours in the week to give marathon training a real go.  And without a strong group to train alongside such as those I benefitted from during my school and university days I asked myself: why not try the long stuff now?

I’ve run a few road races in the past few years, but my focus has undoubtedly been the track until very recently.  My longest race to date was a 17.9 km road race on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, on a bitterly cold day in December 2013.  The majority of my road race outings have followed a similar pattern – go out too fast, then die a death the final 1/2 or 1/3 of the race.  If I follow that same pattern in the marathon I expect to have to endure at least an hour of extremely painful (and potentially humiliating) running/jogging/walking, so perhaps as a byproduct of this venture I’ll learn something about that virtue everyone is always on about – patience. In fact, marathon training and racing (and patience) is so foreign to me that I have decided to write a blog about it!  

The purpose of this blog is to share my marathon journey.  My chosen race is the Belfast Marathon, set for Sunday 5th May 2019.  I chose Belfast as it is a city close to my heart – I was born close by in Lisburn, went to school in Holywood just up the road as a 7 and 8-year-old boy and lived there for four years while studying at Queen’s University and working for a year after graduation.  Since September I have been living in Segovia, around 100km North West of Madrid, teaching English in the afternoons and evenings from Monday to Thursday, with a luxurious 3-day weekend (no longer a raging bender as it might have been back in the Belfast days).  So far I have worked my way up to running in excess of 100 km/week, and I hope to maintain that workload throughout the marathon buildup with some targeted races and training sessions along the way.  I plan to update this blog every Monday or Sunday to recap another (hopefully) successful week of training.  So far I have managed ten weeks of healthy, relatively consistent training, and after a short Christmas break I hope to continue that purple patch into 2019 (and beyond….) Stay tuned.