One more time

So with just over 180 days to go my London marathon training has started the way my last London marathon ended, with an injury. In fact it was the ghost of my old and recurring Perifomis injury has once again been my undoing to the extent that I am considering the 2012 race my last attempt at the 26 mile distance.

The frustration of injury is all the more bewildering as it seems to only occur during an event. This time it was the wonderful Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon in London. Of all the half marathons I've ran I would rate this race in the top five if only for the truly spectacular route and the Village fayre type atmosphere which is strange as the route takes you through some of the most famous land marks in the World.

During my training for this event I ran regularly, harder and faster than I planned to during the race. My plan for the RPF half was to maintain a nice steady pace, just under 9 minutes per mile and may be add some speed towards the end and get in some time around 1:50ish. Alas it wasn't to be, I started feeling that familiar tightness in my lower back as early as 7 miles. At 8 miles I decided to stretch it which seemed to work until mile ten where I met a short downhill section of the course, the impact of my heel hitting the ground finished me off with a pain so intense that I literally went blind for a second.  I found that when I walked I could do so relatively painlessly so I decided to walk the remainder of the course.

I suppose, considering the injury, finishing in 2 hours 34 minutes wasn't too bad but if you watch the video footage of me crossing the finishing line you will clearly see me swearing in frustration. Why was it that I could quite happily run 10 miles in training or a very hilly 6 miles faster and harder than in a half marathon and suffer an injury so early?

The mystery of the injury should actually put me off running but I guess if I were prone to giving up I wouldn't be running marathons in the first place. The initial frustration I felt has subsided and been replaced with a desire to sort this thing out. Next week I will be heading to the sports injury clinic for a bio-mechanical gait analysis. As the injury is re-occurring I hope and wonder if the problem might be something to do with the way I run. I suspect there is an underlying cause to the injury and one I am determined to get the bottom of.

In the mean time I have been on the anti-inflammatory drugs and doing some stretching. Next week I will start some low impact exercise and core strengthening exercises. Apart from all of that the min thing I will be doing is hoping for the best.  

Running technology

Every now and again I like to leave the mp3 player, gps and even my stopwatch at home, put on my kit and just go out for a run. I think it's sometimes easy to forget that it wasn't so long ago that the only piece of technology runners used to rely on was a stopwatch and a decent pair of shoes. These days gps tracking devices are so readily available that we have become somewhat dependent on them.  


Now don't get me wrong, I think the technology available to runners these day is tremendous and benefits novice runners like myself enormously. I use my smart phone, a HTC desire and the running  sportstracklive application which allows me to measure my run and get immediate feedback regarding my pace and distance. It's also possible to link a heart rate monitor to the application and measure cadence breathing rates and optimise calorie burn calculations. This kind of technology used to only be available to professional sports coaches and was limited to elite athletes but now is's often free or a cheap download. For me the principle advantage to this kind of application is that it measure my route so I have a much clearer idea of whether I am hitting my mileage targets every week. I also confess to having taken a phone call while running on more than one occasion and why not, what a marvelous advantage it is to be able to contact a friend or a loved one at anytime. What if there were an emergency? 


I only started running in 2004 but since then the increase in availability of sports tracking type software can be matched by the lower cost of the devices that run them. And it's not just electronic technology, back in 2004 running gels and sports nutrition drinks were limited to lucozade and er.. that was about it. With the running gels come the belts to hold them so much so that many runners line up at the start of a half marathon looking like warriors about to head to the front line into battle against some bizarre enemy. Strapped up and bristling with technology; wireless, bluetooth, gps tracking systems, carbo-loaded to excess. 


Do we really need all this technology though? What if by some cruel twist of fate all the satellites fell from the sky and burned up in the atmosphere? What if all sports drinks were prohibited by law and we runners were forced into blue poweraid speakeasies? I'm sure life would go on and we would go back to measuring our routes with bicycles before we went out for our runs. 


The development of technology in any human endevour is governed by the push/pull forces of want or need and I suppose that the technology available to runners falls into both of those categories. If I were to be perfectly honest I suspect that I don't really need any of the technology available. There is a simple pleasure in running, it's simplicity as a sport if part of it's attraction and yet we try as hard as we can to complicate it as far as we can. I don't think the technology has improved my running one bit but it has made life a little easier for me during my race build-up. 


So it is that every once in a while I leave all of the paraphernalia that increasingly accompanies the sport these days at home just go out for a run. When I do these kind of runs I tend to go exploring, as if the lack of technology has somehow liberated me, I run down random streets making things up as I go along.


This is in fact what I used to do when I first started running, living in Germany at the time I often had no idea where I was anyway. Forget about the training, forget about your average pace, bpm, cadence, calorie burn rate, carbo-loading, glycogen conversion, VTO max, playlists, audiobooks, radio, hands free   wireless high speed internet access. Forget all of that, put on your running shoes, get out the door and admire the scenery, feel the cool, crisp autumnal air under chrome blue sky along the banks of the river. All we do, after all, is just put one foot in front of the other anyway. 

Returning to Marathon running; blogging and training for 2012

While out for my run yesterday the thought crossed my mind that I haven't written a blog post for a very long time. This is a shame because as a novice runner my journey in this sport is still ongoing and I still feel as though I have much to share. The past year has been eventful for so many reasons. 


Finding the time to run has been a bit of a struggle over the past year. I've been training to become a teacher, a particularly intensive course which was physically and mentally demanding so much so I found running has slipped down my list of priorities. I would run in short bursts of activity, over school holidays and weekends but trying to squeeze a run into my daily routine of school and college assignments was difficult. 

Another consequence of working in a school is disease. Working with large numbers of children I was constantly exposed to a lot of viruses and it was a virus that spelled the end of my running ambitions for 2011 suffering as I did from a seemingly unshakable infection for three weeks I found it very difficult to train to anywhere near the level I believed necessary to complete a marathon. I decided to withdraw from the 2011 London Marathon, it was a disappointing moment but I wasn't prepared to risk a similar experience to the one I had in 2010. After finishing the 2010 race I was determined to do better, my training was compromised by injury that time and I wasn't prepared to run again unless I felt prepared.


The consequence of Marathon withdrawal was a differed place, in fact as soon as I withdrew I knew I had made the right decision. All of a sudden I had an entire year of training ahead of me but not just training for the Virgin London Marathon (VLM)  but the London Marathon 2012. 


I started to think about periodization, breaking down my training year into sections or phases focusing on particular aspects to my training. I knew I needed to improve my fitness and my first target was quite simply to get fit enough to start training for an endurance event again. I also wanted to build some endurance training into my running before the end of the year, I also wanted to start my Marathon build-up slightly earlier, training over 16 weeks rather than my usual 12 week training program. 


So with those targets in mind I started with a four week program of short running with mixed pace runs, interval training and strides. I can tell you that I hate fast runs, I find them extremely difficult but I was determined to get my running legs back. During those two weeks I didn't do any running over 25 minutes, concentrating on speed and strength rather than endurance. I have been getting used to this type of running and while I have started to do some longer runs the idea of speed work has become less abhorrent.


I'm now entering the second phase of my training as I prepare for the Royal Parks Half Marathon in October. I've decided to set myself a fairly modest target for this race with a target finishing time of sub 1:50. My reasoning for this is that I'm keeping everything in perspective. The Royal parks race will be my 8th half marathon but I intend to run Hastings in March 2012 as I prepare for the VLM and that's where I intend to attack my personal best time. For the moment the Royal Parks race is a great way to build some endurance into my training, build some strength into my legs and give me a great indication as to where I am with my running. 


The next phase will be the all important marathon build up including the Hastings half marathon and at least a couple of 10km races. I've decided to extend my training, beginning at the start of December, this will give me a few weeks to recover from the half marathon training and time to do some more speed and strength work before the final push. 

Missing out on London 2011 may well be a blessing in disguise.