And... rest.

Today is a rest day, that means no exercising and as little activity as possible. There may be many people out there unkind enough to suggest that I should be an expert at this already but for us marathon runners, rest days are as important and the most intensive training sessions.

The whole point of training is to place a certain amount of stress on your body, the body then reacts to that stress by developing muscle in order to cope with the additional activity. One of the greatest misconceptions about running is that in order to become a good runner you have to go out and run every day. Not only is this not true it's also incredibly bad for you.

All sport place different kinds of stress on your body, the long distance runner's body has to cope with a repetitive pounding of what is almost three times their body weight hitting the ground over-and-over again for hours on end. Over the past three days I have run about 22 miles with yesterdays Kenyan hill session being particularly strenuous so today is a perfect day to give my body time to recover.

From a technical point of view rest (some people call them recovery) days enable the muscles, tendons and joints time to deal with the physical stress of training and in doing so, enable the runner to cope with a progressively intensive level of training activity. Rest days are therefore massively important in avoiding injury, if you were to run constantly for weeks on end if would only be a matter of time before your body would break down and that kind of break down can be disastrous.

So there you have it, one of the best ways to prepare for a marathon is to sit around and absolutely nothing for a day. It's a good idea to plan for a rest day, treat the rest day as part of your training. The best day to have a rest day is after one of your most intensive training sessions like a hard interval or a hill training day. Plan to have your rest day on a day when you are likely to be doing less than you usually do, i.e, don't have a rest day when you have to go to work.

Hill training

My training week is broken down into three core sessions, a long run at the weekend, a decent mixed paced (either a Fartlek, interval or threshold) run and a long hill session. Today I ran one of the long hill or Kenyan hill sessions which comprised of quite simply running up and down a fairly challenging hill four times. My local hill is One Tree Hill which is close to Honor Oak Park train station, a climb which I have become quite familiar with as it's part of he route I take to get to Peckham Common where I do quite a lot of my running at present. I run up one side, down the other to East Dulwich Road where I turn around and repeat the process. The route is about one and a half miles long so after a few reps the miles start to stack up.

So what's the point? What advantage is there to putting my legs through this kind of self inflicted torture? Well I first read about Kenyan Hill sessions in an article in Runners World magazine just before I started training for the 2006 London Marathon. Having struggled around the Cologne Marathon I was determined to finish the London race with a little more style than the exhausted heap I ended up with in Germany. Reading the article the writer had spent some time in Kenya training with the National athletics team where one day they went out for a hill training session. Our journalist had been used to hill training sessions that comprised of short, fast runs up hills so off he set, pounding his way to the top only to discover that the whole Kenyan national Marathon team wasn't even half way up the hill. The Kenyans were jogging at a steady pace as he passed them on the way back down and by the time he's turned around he had caught up with them again they had only just reached the summit. The Journalist managed a couple more reps before his knees started to ache but the Kenyans went on, maintaining a steady pace, jogging to the top and then recovering on the way down for another four hours. FOUR HOURS!

Kenyan Hill sessions are designed to help build deep muscle strength, the kind of muscle you need late on in a marathon post about 20 miles when all your glycogen reserves have been used up and you're really staring to hurt. There are many advantages to this kind of training for example:

• Developing your aerobic capacity; your body learns to use oxygen more efficiently over longer distances.
• Increased stamina, enabling you to run longer and further.
• Improved running action (biometrics), giving you a spring in your step than enables you to develop a longer stride length and reduced stress with ground impact.

Reading the article I was impressed. This sounded like just the kind of thing I needed to help boost my strength so off I went, looking for an appropriate hill. Fortunately, at that time I was living in Charlton, an area of South East London that is basically on a hill and just down the road from me was Shooters Hill one of the highest points in London. Actually, Shooters Hill is probably a bit too big for a Kenyan Hill session but I did it anyway, starting of with two climbs. I can still remember the way I felt after the first time I did it, I was in absolute agony!

There is another very good reason for doing these kind of training sessions and that's a psychological one. I can pretty much guarantee that the way you feel as you reach the summit on you 4th or 5th rep, your legs will feel not dissimilar to the way you'll feel at the end of a marathon. You will want to stop. This kind of mental preparation is invaluable, you might get it on some of your longer distance training runs but you get it every time on a Kenyan session.

New shoes

One of the great things about running as a sport is that it's a relatively cheap sport to pursue. The only real expense you'll encounter as a runner is the purchase of running shoes. This morning I've taken delivery of a new pair of Mizuno wave inspire 6, these cost me about 85 GBP. As far as I'm concerned they are worth every penny as over the years I've tried various brands and always found myself coming back to the Mizuno wave series.

As I have a pretty good idea about they kind of shoes I like to run in, I ordered my new pair on line but it's well worth going to a couple of specialist running shops to try out the new releases from various brands.

If you are a first time runner choosing running shoes can be a daunting, even intimidating experience. There are so many brands and types of shoe designed for different running styles and if you decide to do a bit of research you'll end up bombarding yourself with podiatrist technical jargon. The best thing to do is go to a running shop that has a treadmill an preferably does something called gait analysis. There are many shops in London that provide this service and if you're buying for the first time it's essential to have this done in order to have your running style assessed.


Once it's been worked out what kind of runner you are, you can decide of which shoe you want to buy. Personally I need a running shoe that provides some support so the runing shop should have a few brands of shoe taylored to my specific needs. A good salesman will offer you a selection of two or three shoes and let you try them out on a treadmill. This is important, if the sales assistant only offers you one type of shoe, don't buy them. Apart from the gait analysis the most important thing is comfort. You may be offered the perfect pair of shoes as far as the gait analysis is concerned but are they the most comfortable shoes? You can only find this out by trying a few different pairs before you buy.

Here are a few tips about buying shoes I've picked up:

• Buy Big! My actual shoe size is 10 UK but my running shoe size is 11.5. The reason for this is that your feet expand a you run, this is a particular problem for long distance runners. Your feet need room to grow as by the end of a marathon they'll be a whole shoe size bigger. As a guide you should have about a thumbs thickness of room between the tip of your toe and the end of the shoe.
  
• Shop around! Apart from anything else it's quite good fun to go around stores trying shoes and chatting to people about your running. Once you've determined which shoes are right for your check out the online price, you may save yourself a bit of money.
• Don't buy for brand or looks! You might think Adidas or Nike look cool but looking cool won't get you across the finish line. Go for comfort and type of shoe. If you don't know what type of shoe you need get some gait analysis.

Happy running!