Keep on running!

Finally I have managed to run continuously for three miles! Having said last week that I would increase my sessions I decided to increase them even further by running five in five days, increasing the running time each day. This meant that by the Friday I was running twenty minutes non-stop. I had no adverse reaction at all and felt good. Well, not good, but certainly not in any muscular pain. My cardio fitness is way down from where it was six months ago so hopefully this will improve over the next month.

To celebrate finishing my return to running schedule I decided to go out for a three mile run on the Saturday morning and then another on the Monday morning. This week I will run five times, three sessions of three miles and two of four miles. Then the next week I will run three sessions of four miles and two of five miles and so on and so on. Hopefully this will ease my body back to regular running as well as improving my cardio fitness. It feels good to be running instead of run/walking which I’ve always found to be more difficult than just running. Perhaps it’s the stop-start aspect of it that grates with me. Also, I find that you look forward to the walking section and see the running as a bit of a punishment whereas when I am running continuously I can concentrate just on how I am running without thinking about stopping. It’s all in the mind!

Talking of all in the mind I’m currently reading a book called Brain Training for Runners. According to the author our brains try to fool us into thinking that we are in pain to prevent the body depleting it’s resources when in fact we can physically run much further. He cites an example of a person who is running a marathon and no matter how difficult it gets for them or how much their brain is screaming to walk or stop or lie down or do anything other than put one foot in front of the other but as soon as the finishing line comes into sight they are capable of putting in a sprint for 200-300 metres. It is interesting stuff but I think it’s going to take a while for me to stop listening to my brain especially if I start to get pain twinges in my calf.

On Saturday my run took me through Walpole Park next to the Ealing Studios. I saw at least half a dozen other runners there and it was pretty early on Saturday morning, about 7am. I’m sure more people are running these days. Maybe it’s because there’s more coverage on the tv or maybe it’s just because it’s sunny and warm. No matter, the more runners the better as far as I am concerned.

Here’s my run from this morning that I took round Ealing

Spring is almost here

I love this time of year for running. Everything starts to take on a new colour and it becomes both lighter and warmer in the morning.
I've always been a morning runner, I find it starts off the day in the right way. It's quieter and gives me a chance to get my head right before going to work. My absolute favourite run is an early morning long run on a Sunday. When I trained for the Brighton marathon last year I had to regularly run 19, 20 and 22 miles. From where I live this meant that I was able to run into central London and past all the tourist spots. On a Sunday morning there would hardly be anyone around and it was a bit like that scene at the start of 28 Days Later where the guy is just wandering aimlessly across the Thames. I would run through Hyde Park, down past Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, across the Thames, past the London Eye and back again via the Royal Albert Hall. I'd be back in the house by 9am when most "normal" people were just about getting up. I can't wait until marathon training starts again later this year so I can do some of my favourite routes that take me further afield than the local area.
That is one of the joys I get from running. Finding new routes. I've managed to discover pretty much all the canal paths, parks and general trails around where I live. I spend hours on mapmyrun.com just trying to find a new area that I've never explored before. The great thing about such sites as mapmyrun is seeing routes defined by other people that you've never thought of doing. Maybe I'm just sad!!
Anyway, back to how my "barefoot" running is going. I've increased the run part of the run/walk schedule to 1 minute of running. I have noticed that my calfs and ankles are doing a bit more work as well as the arches and balls of my feet. I'm presuming this is all to be expected as the muscles strengthen. Two more runs later this week on Wednesday and Friday. On the 5th June there's a 10k at Clapham Common so I think I'll enter that as it occurs just at the end of this training schedule. That will then give me two weeks before my marathon training starts.
Here's my first training run of the week:



I'm thinking of taking a camera on my training runs so I can take pictures as I go around and post them on here. Will have to find a decent camera that is lightweight and can take a bit of a battering should I drop it (which I will). Any suggestions welcome!

First post! Not the last.

Hello. I'm a forty year old runner living in Ealing in West London. I'm hoping that by keeping this blog it will give me both a useful journal of my running activities and general thoughts about the world at large.
I've never kept a blog or even a diary before so will have to see how this goes. I've been reading other runners' blogs and thought how hard can it be? Well, pretty hard since it's taken me months to get from idea to reality. I think the problem is what to write.
Let's start at the beginning. I've been running "properly" for the last three years. Before that I would train for a couple of months for a 10k race and then do nothing else for the rest of the year before the next 10k race the next year. This all stopped in August 2008. I had signed up for the Nike 10k race in London and had trained for three months. Finally crossing the line in 65 minutes my usual pattern would mean hanging up my running shoes for another nine months and digging them out for the next Nike 10k. I have no idea why but this time I decided to carry on running two or three times a week. Before I knew it it was Spring and there were a plethora of races to enter. 10k race times came down and within a few months I was going sub-50 minutes. Progress! After 10k races came the half-marathon which whetted my appetite and I decided to go for the big one. So it came that on April 18th 2010 I found myself lining up for the inaugural Brighton Marathon. All the training came together and 3 hours, 44 minutes and 46 seconds later I found myself crossing the line. I vowed never to run another marathon again. I kept this promise for six weeks and then ran the Chester marathon! In October 2010 I ran the Cardiff Half-Marathon in 1 hour, 35 minutes and 6 seconds.
Then disaster struck.
While on a training run with my girlfriend I pulled my calf muscle. Nothing much I thought! How wrong could I be. Four months later and too many physio sessions to mention I am now able to run again. That's when I thought I could keep a blog to track my road to recovery as well as the road to my next marathon in Chester in October 2011.
The added twist to this is that I am going to change my running style completely and run wearing Vibram Five Fingers Bikila shoes. More on this in a future post but for now let me say that in order to do this I will have to start my training as though I have never run before. From running 6 days a week and averaging about 30 miles I am going to be following a run/walk training programme so my feet, calves and joints all condition themselves slowly. It may get frustrating but I'm hoping that slowly, slowly will indeed catchy monkey.
To that end here's my first training run using the run/walk method in my "finger feet" as my girlfriend calls them:



As you can see I'm not exactly smashing records yet!
That just about wraps up this post. I'm hoping that I'll find more of a style as I write more and more of these posts so if this one feels a little dry then give it time and before you know it I'll be a regular PG Wodehouse!