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.