Wednesday 31 October 2012

My First Marathon

Wow.

I am sorry I did say I was going to write a decent amount of blog posts about my marathon training but in the end I did it all via www.runnersworld.co.uk  I created a post on their beginners forums and put all my posts and updates in there.

Here is the thread

So if you want please read through that thread and you will basically get my training experience.



So how did I do. Well I finished in 5h 30m 22s.  Now some will say this is slowww, but you know what I'm darn well proud that I managed to get around.

So how did I start, well I started my diet on 21st March at 15st 8lbs.  Then at the end of April I was in the office in Milton Keynes, and just said sod it i'm signing up for the Leicester Marathon on 14th of October.  I then celebrated my birthday and got that week or so out of the way.  Then came home, and said that's it.  I hunted around and found the running plan that was most appropriate for me at asics.co.uk So I signed up and i've ran with that plan.  I had days when i was knackered from work, but apart from two weeks when I was injured I did every single run on the plan, and as time went on added a few extra runs in.  I was very nervous, but I just put all of my faith in the plan and it worked!! I did it.  I was looking at my plan now and amazingly I have now had 99 runs and have ran a total of 666km every single run I do, I add to my.asics.co.uk one of the reasons that I decided on the asics website was because I used asics 2170 trainers :)  Pot luck really but hey I got the right pair at the beginning and loved them :)  Only 1 blister in all my training and that was the one time i was silly and changed my socks as an experiment.. well i won't make that mistake again.

So what was the marathon itself like.

It was amazing.  I set off to quick. I thought that I was going slow but I wasn't I was going quicker than normal, oops!! i slowed down after the first 5km or so, but managed to get to the halfway point in 2h 30m so i was on for a 5h marathon.  But that was to quick compared to my training plans, so I really found it a bit of a struggle in the second half.  I had a 6km stretch from around 32km that was really difficult but i kept plodding along and got a bit of a second wind for the last few km, which was awesome running through the centre of Leicester with the Sunday afternoon shoppers watching on.  It's really hard as the final 1 km is pretty much all uphill, great fun :)

It's funny but the worse thing in the last few km was going downhill. I was starting to get slightly wobbly legs, and found downhill was a heck of a strain on my calves.  But, hey I kept going and got there.  The three photo's above were great.  2 minutes after the line, the others show me literally going phewwwww after crossing the line, and the look on my face when I was being given my medal. It was such an awesome feeling.

Sorry this doesn't make much sense it's like an excited utterance of YESSSS I DID IT :)