No Injuries ’19?

I didn’t set a concrete New Year’s resolution, but when asked by a student in my first class on Tuesday afternoon last week what mine was, it got me thinking. As I have mentioned in previous entries, I have struggled with injuries a lot in the six years I’ve been training. So much so that I actually laughed out loud towards the end of last term when I had to teach an evening class on preventing sports injuries to my class, and quickly anointed myself the least qualified person possible to teach that lesson! So I suppose my New Year’s Resolution is simple – don’t get injured. I think this is going to be particularly important when training for the marathon as consistency in training seems to be the key ingredient in every good marathon performance, and nothing kills consistency quite like sustaining an injury which sidelines you for weeks or months.

Running is a frustratingly simple sport, and the number one rule is that the guy (or girl) who trains consistently over the course of weeks, months, and eventually years, has the greatest chance of reaching their potential. While consistency is the name of the game, it is quite difficult to achieve (or at least it has been in my case). It wasn’t until I listened to The Daly Podcast featuring David McCarthy (https://soundcloud.com/user-714533178/2-david-mccarthy/s-8J2Vr) that it began to dawn on me what had to be done to maintain consistency. I absolutely recommend the episode to anyone who has struggled with injury, as it was a revelation to me. David was a very high level athlete with a mile PB of 3.55, but dealt with numerous injuries in his career – which eventually brought it to an end. Now he coaches athletes in Ireland, and a big feature of the talk was about injury prevention and maintaining consistency in training. The main takeaway points that I gathered from the talk were: 1) equip yourself with a set of tools to deal with and stave off injury, and 2) it is better to be a little underprepared than slightly over-trained.

For me, this has meant giving up my routine of running every single day, and taking one day of “rest” per week. A common sticking point that people have with taking a day off each week is the following “that’s 52 days of the year you’re not running”. While that is a point well made, I’ve personally only had one year (2017) during which I’ve missed less than 3 months (or 90ish days) of training to injury. Most of the years I’ve been running I’ve missed between 3 and 9 months of running to niggles and injuries which could easily have been avoided with a diligent injury-prevention routine. A day off per week is routine for many top athletes and as long as sufficient volume is achieved in the remaining six days I am hoping to effect will be a net positive. The proof will be in the pudding, as they say.

Just because I’m taking a day off doesn’t mean I can’t do anything to improve my running. So now instead of going out on a Monday morning for a handful of slow kilometres, I will take the opportunity to rest my legs and head to the pool for a swim. I’m no triathlete and have no real goals for my swimming, but being able to get in 30 – 60 minutes of aerobic training without putting extra stress on my already-fatigued legs is a great tool for me moving forward as I try to improve my fitness while avoiding injury. And then in the evening, with freshened legs from a relaxed swim, I will do a simple circuit of injury-prevention and bodyweight exercises. I’ll run the other six days of the week – three quality days and three maintenance days. On a quality day I’ll either be doing some faster running like a fartlek or track sessionn, and on a maintenance day I’ll just go out and run at a very easy pace for around an hour over quite testing terrain. One quality day per week will either be a race or a long run (>2 hrs). I try to swim on my maintenance days as a bit of additional training, and on the quality days I’ll do the same circuit of exercises as on my day off. I followed this routine for the last weeks of 2018 after running at the Seeley 10k and found it worked well, as I was able to run another 10k PB just two weeks later.

The Week (16 weeks until the Belfast Marathon)

Week one was really eleven days, as I started training as soon as I got back from Sierra Leone. Overall I am very happy with this as a start to marathon training. Over the Christmas break I ran weeks of 83, 83 and 87 km, and with a first week marathon week of 106 km (in six days of running) I am encouraged. Wednesday’s fartlek was a bit disappointing as I felt very sluggish (not unexpected given I ran a grand total of 3 sub 4 kilometres during the Christmas holidays and was trying to churn out 3.30 pace on the run) but Friday was a strong session and I was particularly pleased with my two long runs – 29.7 km @ 4.24/km and 33.8 km @ 4.18/km. The latter was supposed to be closer to 30 km but I managed to take two wrong turns which added a bit of unwanted distance.

Th 3 Jan – 41′ easy (8.1 km)

F 4 Jan – 68′ easy (14.4 km) + prehab

Sa 5 Jan – 68′ easy (14.4 km)

Su 6 Jan – 2h 10′ steady (29.7 km) (total for the week = 87 km)

M 7 Jan – 1250m swim + prehab

Tu 8 Jan – 69′ easy (14.4 km) + 1500m swim

W 9 Jan – 80′ fartlek – 10×2′ fast, 1′ slow (18.1 km) + prehab

Th 10 Jan – 68′ easy (14.4 km) + 1500m swim

F 11 Jan – 20′ w/u, 25′ tempo (7.0 km), 6×100m hill sprints, 15′ c/d (15.8 km) + prehab

Sa 12 Jan – 51′ easy (10.0 km) + 1250m swim

Su 13 Jan – 2h 25′ steady (33.8 km) (total for the week = 106 km)

• 

Again I sit in Casablanca’s Mohamed V airport, typing steadily to kill some of my eight-hour layover. This time, with the sun tan (*burn) I was hoping to achieve and a few more kilometres on my legs than I expected to run.

THE TRAVEL

Getting to Sierra Leone is not an easy journey. It was a much longer journey when I used to live in Belfast, but even from Segovia I doubt I could complete the journey in less than 14 hours, even with all the luck and punctuality in the world. The route from Segovia to Casablanca was remarkably straight-forward, aside from the slightly confusing satellite terminal I had to pass through in Madrid airport, but once I stepped foot onto the Casablanca runway things started to go pear-shaped. I hate to generalise but of the four African airports I’ve been through, only one has had anything close to a calm or controlled atmosphere, and that was Eldoret airport in Kenya where the average number of passengers on any given plane is probably less than 50. Not so in Casablanca, with seemingly the entire Sierra Leonean diaspora on their way home for Christmas and bearing gifts.

Once you land in Sierra Leone you are still hours away from getting into Freetown, thanks to the airport having been built on a peninsula, via a six-hour coach journey, or a half-hour ferry ride across a 20km-wide inlet. The ferry mightn’t sound so bad, if it weren’t for the completely chaotic nature of the crossing. First you need to deposit your bag with the ferry company, and choose which porter you would like to pay 10,000 Leones (about £1) to carry it a grand total of 50 metres from the terminal to the luggage bus. You also have to navigate every other person in the arrivals lounge trying to sell you a SIM card and a ferry ticket. Then the waiting starts, as travel-weary passengers load into the bus which takes you down to the ferry terminal – a wooden-walled shed full of plastic chairs and tables looking out into the darkness outside, behind which hides the sprawling expanse of Freetown. The wait in that (albeit large) shed can last anywhere from 1 to 2 hours, before decamping down a rickety wooden pontoon to the ferry. Well, “ferry” could be an overstatement. It is essentially a floating bus, playing cheesy music and equipped with lifejackets which don’t fasten but you are encouraged to wear regardless. The ferry journey is usually swift, although on this occasion some plastic got caught in the boat’s propellers and left us wondering if there was a fuel shortage as we bobbed aimlessly halfway between the shore we had left and the shore we were trying to get to. After the engine started up again and we began motoring towards Freetown again, the staff on the boat walked the length with a box wrapped with Christmas paper and with a slit cut in the top, asking if anyone wanted to donate a ‘present’ (another 10,000 Leones duly handed over). Finally arriving at the ferry terminal on the mainland, a real sense of relief washed over me – the waiting was finally over. I quickly grabbed my baggage and leapt into my dad’s Land Rover, and headed back to the house.

THE RUNNING

The first run of the trip was only preceded by a cup of tea. My flight landed at 3.35 am, my ferry arrived in the terminal around 6.40 am and I was out the door and doing loops around the compound my parents live on by 7.20 am, my logic being that as I was already tired, I may as well do the run right away and then chill out the rest of the day and not worry about it. The loop is about 350m long and I did about 30 laps for 11ish km – it’s all on Strava if you’re interested in the gnarly details. I did quite a lot of running on that loop over the 12 days I spent in Sierra Leone, interspersed with occasional outings with the local Sierra Leone army PTI, Staff Sergeant Matea, who I have run with every time I’ve been out to Sierra Leone. A veteran marathon runner, he was excited to hear I was giving the event a go myself, and immediately suggested we do his ‘marathon test run’ before I headed back to Spain. I agreed out of curiosity more than anything else, and it looked like my plan to take it easy over Christmas was out of the window. The run took me from an area of Freetown called Regent to the army physical training camp in Benguema. Looking at a map beforehand with my dad we estimated the run would be about 25 km, and we weren’t far off – it came out to just short of 26 km.

What I hadn’t been prepared for was the mad nature of the run. The pace was comfortable and the course overall downhill, but everything else about it was pretty stressful. The run started on the equivalent of an A road in the UK, and then moved onto the main highway from Freetown to Hastings, a large town about 20 km from Freetown. Running through a toll gate was a fairly unique and bizarre experience (we didn’t have to pay the 5,000 Leones to pass, for anyone wondering). The last 5 or 6 km was on a slightly calmer section of road, traffic wise. Aside from the relative lack of speeding vehicles, though, it was absolutely mad. We seemed to have chosen market time as the streets were packed with police guiding traffic, stalls spilling out into the road and hordes of people and animals everywhere. I suspect Matea had told his colleagues that I was doing the test run as there were quite a few guys waiting in the courtyard of the training camp to watch us finish, and Matea put in a noticeable surge in the final few hundred metres. The guys waiting in the courtyard were eager to hear my time – 2 hrs 4 mins – which they seemed impressed with. The rest of the trip was made up of mostly easy running, either around the camp loop, on a beach or up and down to a smaller army camp. On the last day of my stay I took on my now traditional challenge of racing up Leicester Peak (a steep 1.8 km hill behind the compound) as fast as I could, improving my best to 9 minutes 13 seconds (from 9.20 back in April 2017). All in all, in my 12 days of Sierra Leonean running (warm-weather training?!) I clocked up a total of 129 kilometres, and managed to get out and run every day of the trip, even if a few of those were pathetic hungover stumbles around the compound loop.

THE REST

When I wasn’t running I wasn’t exactly living the life of an athlete. Christmas and New Year celebrations don’t exactly lend themselves to feeling fresh every morning, and particularly between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day I felt pretty consistently ropey. That didn’t prevent a few brilliant days out, including a couple of trips to the beach, lots of swimming in the compound swimming pool (watched by monkeys from the trees nearby), and a few boozy outings to restaurants. All in all a great Christmas break and over far too soon – the ferry back was enjoyed even less than the trip out! Now to get back to Spain and stuck into training for this marathon!

2018 has been an odd year. To use a tired cliche, it has been a real rollercoaster ride. Again, an end-of-year review is a cliche in itself, so perhaps my pursuit of originality has failed from the off. I digress.

This year has been book-ended by trips to Sierra Leone, but having the same location as a start and a finish is probably where the comparisons to Tolkein’s ‘The Hobbit’ end. Perhaps some metaphor could be built about a Lonely Mountain and of man-eating spiders, but I’ll leave that to the fantasy writers. The best way to look at my year, is through locations:

Sierra Leone

The year began on a beach, with a bit of a splash as I dove into the Atlantic ocean naked around 3 am, with a few too many Star beers swilling around my system. I was coming off a short injury period and had high hopes for the year – 2017 had been something of a breakthrough in terms of getting consistent training in, and as a result I had set PB times across the board – from 800m to 5 km. I was also excited to start a new job in Belfast in the New Year, so things were looking up. I headed back to Belfast with a glowing tan and some pep in my step.

Belfast

On arrival in Belfast in early January, I was keen to get stuck into training and my new job. Too keen, it soon became clear. In an ill-advised attempt to speed up the process of getting fit, I started jumping on a spin bike in the evenings. In one of the first sessions (a Monday evening, so potentially the first session, my memory is hazy on the details) I put in a good effort, but on walking home from a friend’s birthday drinks that evening my knee started creaking, and by the time I got home I could barely ascend or descend stairs without wincing and clinging onto the bannister for support. Thus began a deeply frustrating cycle – wait for the knee to feel normal, do a few runs and then have it seize up once again. By early March, having pulled out of yet another race I had planned to do, I was utterly convinced I was done running. I’ve had plenty of injury issues over the years, but this one felt different. Maybe it had something to do with being in full-time work. Regardless, I remember very clearly telling a friend in a grimy Holylands St Patrick’s Day house party that my running days were over.

That “retirement” lasted all of about 3 weeks. Queen’s was hosting the Irish University Athletics Championship and I put myself down to commentate. The morning of the championships I decided to go for a jog, and surprised myself, running quite fluidly and at a fair pace. While my commentary career was short-lived, my running was revived, and I even scored a win at my local parkrun a few weeks into this comeback. Two weeks later I was on the sidelines again, this time with a back injury, and I spent my 22nd birthday limping like an octogenarian. I had been in a bit of a funk for a lot of 2018 up to when I resumed training but once I was back running regularly I began to think a little more clearly. In late May I signed up for a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course in July, and I am almost glad I wasn’t training when I did that course – it was exhausting. The course finished in late July, I packed my things, enjoyed a boozy week of farewells and bid Belfast farewell.

Ramsgate

Early July saw me move back to England, to stay with my aunts in sunny Kent. My training was beginning to pick up again and I was able to catch up with friends from school between firing out applications for different language schools all over the world. Again, after a few weeks of training I jumped into a parkrun, and performed relatively well with a 3rd place finish and low 17 min run, off very limited training. Emboldened, I stepped up the training and surely enough I was injured again within a fortnight! Another back injury. I was disappointed but very quickly heard news that I would be moving to Spain to teach English for a year in late September, which made the injury much easier to take. The last weeks of my stay in Ramsgate were spent hurriedly attempting to learn some basic Spanish and checking out Segovia on google maps’ street view function.

Segovia

When I first got to Segovia I was still limping from the pesky back injury, but over a period of roughly two weeks I found I could walk more comfortably, then jog to the shop, then run 20 minutes, and eventually train properly again. The buildup was gradual and the moderate altitude (perhaps this is where to insert that Lonely Mountain metaphor) and high-20s temperature of Segovia kept my pace slow. On my third week of ‘training’ (really just going for a run as many days of the week as I fancied) I ran in a local race, 16.5 km of rolling trails and road from a town called La Granja back to Segovia. After a slightly stressful journey to La Granja where I nearly missed my bus, I started in the mid pack, intending to cruise through the field in the second half. The course was mostly downhill and before long the competitive juices were flowing and I was moving up the field. Although the course was largely downhill, there was a cruel uphill at the finish – about 2 km of steep climbing from the bottom of the valley where we had been running alongside the river to the finish under the famous Roman aqueduct of Segovia. I finished 13th in 64 minutes, and immediately began looking for more races to do! Cathal Logue, a friend of mine who I met in Belfast, lives in Madrid, invited me down to run a 10km race. The night before the race we discussed what shape we thought were in and both came to the conclusion that we didn’t really know, but thought we would run around 36 minutes. We jogged to the start line just outside the Children’s Hospital the race is run in benefit of, and it turned out we were a minute out to the good, as we both recorded surprisingly strong results on the tough out-and-back course, myself just inside 35 minutes with 34.54 and Cathal just outside with 35.02. Again, I was excited by the strong result (that was an official PB for me at the time) and I was keen to get stuck into training.

My next race was due to be the Joe Seeley 10km in Belfast on the first weekend of December, and in the three weeks following the Corre por el Nino 10km in Madrid I recorded 305 km – weeks of 95, 108 and 102 km. While I wasn’t doing very much fast running, a tough weekly fartlek and lots of easy running over rough terrain whipped me into shape. Despite a late night before the race travelling to stay with Matthew Devlin in Belfast, I felt fairly good on race day and after a short warm up jog I set off in the midst of an absolute stampede of runners. If I were capable of staying injury free consistently, I would make a point of running the Seeley every year. It is among the best races in the UK and Ireland to run a PB for 10K, unless you are running considerably under 31 minutes. The depth is incredible every year, and every club in Northern Ireland worth it’s salt sends a team. My team, Annadale Striders, ended up in 4th place overall, and I was dragged round to a 33.36 clocking – a PB by well over a minute! I also scored a valuable victory over ex-training partner Luke Dinsmore, if only by chiptime! A night out in Belfast and extremely hungover trip back to Segovia followed, my head almost as blurry as Tyson Fury’s after the devastating knock-out punch I watched Deontay Wilder deliver at 5.30 that morning (how he got up from that is a mystery to myself and I am sure a great number of people). Another two weeks of training passed, including two strong 23km fartlek runs, and on another visit to Madrid (again courtesy of Cathal) I took another handful of seconds off my 10km PB with a 33.29 run at the very competitive Villa de Aranjuez 10km. 2018 was well and truly salvaged in the months of November and December. Mixed in between those races were a series of exams for the pupils at the language school I teach at, and the accompanying flurry of end-of-term reports, so it is fair to say I was reaching for the finish line and am looking forward to a few weeks off.

Sierra Leone

And back again. With a third 10km PB in six weeks I have decided to call 2018 a year and wind down my training for the Christmas break (what a soft b*stard, I know…) As I sit in the Mohammed V airport in Casablanca I can’t help but feel a mixture of pride and relief about how 2018 turned out. Sierra Leone beckons and I am looking forward to having an easy couple of weeks of training, before getting stuck into marathon training in the New Year. I have a few races planned for 2019 but for now the main focus is to catch up on some lost sleep and get a suntan. Let’s hope Freetown is still as entertaining as it was last Christmas!

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.