Back To My Roots

If someone is still reading this, congratulations on your patience. If not, well then this blog is back to what I intended it to be when it all started back in 2005 - my own little running diary, to enable me to look back at my marathon training and see what it was like, what went well, what did not.

Also, after years of being told that the title of my blog is just wrong, it got back to being pretty accurate, depending on where you draw the levels, of course. I'm reasonably sure I will never run under 3:30 again, and as long as I stay under 4 hours for my next marathon, I'll be happy, which is, again, a return to where I was when I started out.

One more return to where I started: the next marathon will be Dublin, which of course was also the scene of my first ever marathon.

One more return: I dug out my ancient copy of the P&D Advanced Marathoning book and decided to follow the training plan, the same plan that got me my first sub-4 marathon so many years ago. Let's hope it will deliver again.

I had signed up for Dublin back in 2020, but we all know what happened then. My running performance has taken a massive dive since then, for various reasons: age has not been kind to me, well, after all I'm well over 50 now. However, I think the major issue was that I finally started to pay the price for years of slight overtraining and never truly recovering. I got away with it for a long, long time, and I'm not complaining because it got me to levels that I would not even have dared to dream about, but at some point the body decided it had enough and that was that.

Subsequently my motivation took a nose dive a well, the idea of training my arse off just to be running 2 minutes a mile slower than I used to just wasn't all that appealing.

So, why am I back? Well, I'm still running about 6 times a week, though mostly for health reasons, and to allow me to keep my weight down while being able to eat whatever I like, and while I'm much slower than I used to be, I'm still beating anyone on the couch, so why not. That marathon entry might just be the ticket to entice me to keep running, so that's what I 'll do. 

Oh yeah, and this entry is actually a little bit late already - I've finished week one already, so that's only  17 weeks left. I haven't stuck to the plan religiously, I swapped a rest day for a slow 5k jog, and the recovery run for Saturday was spent pacing 26 minutes at Shanganagh parkrun, though that turned out to be recovery effort anyway.

So far, so good.