Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner

I've only got a few minutes, here from an Intenet cafe. We drove up to Clifden on Friday, and got to our accomodation at 9pm. I slept li...

With four days to go, it's time for another summary post of my training. This will make it easy to get a quick overview of each training...

So what is your race day plan? How fast do you go out for a 39.3 mile race? 7:30's could be deadly later on... Canada Mike made a very ...

What can I say that I haven’t said before? I’m in the middle of my taper, the serious training is over and done, and despite itching to run ...

Monday was a bank holiday in Ireland (bank holiday = public holiday), but, as Niamh said, they shouldn’t have bank holidays in March; they’r...

I did some more soul searching Thursday evening regarding the length of Friday’s run. I studied some more marathon training plans on the web...

Allow me to indulge one more time into the afterglow of Sunday’s race. I know I’m straining your patience, but if you break 40 minutes at yo...

I managed to find a spreadsheet with the results from Sunday’s race (Google Docs are cool, btw). I came 43rd out of 200 runners, which isn’...

Even though it feels longer, my last race was less than 10 weeks ago, on New Year’s Day. On that day I managed to surprise myself by posting...

I intended to taper for three weeks, but if I look at my training schedule, it turned out to be more like three-and-a-half weeks. Because of...

For the last few months I have focused solely on the ultra, but I guess at some stage I have to look past that. Therefore I decided to sign ...

I experienced what was basically a flat tyre the other day; but not on my car, no, on my shoe. Those Nike 360s are cushioned on air, and one...

After spending the last few weeks doing those insanely long double headers, I tried to inject a little bit of pace into my running. I don’t ...

I was more than a little apprehensive about this particular double-header. All of you who suggested caution were right, of course. I was alr...

The last few days have been remarkably similar. My cold is not shifting, and I don’t feel very well. On the other hand, it’s not bad enough ...

As predicted on Friday, Saturday’s run was very enjoyable. I am doing all kinds of workouts these days, hill running, mile repeats, long dou...

Good God, was I glad when I finally stumbled back into our house today after the run. I really was at the end of my strength. Not for the fi...

The last few days have been miserable as far as the weather is concerned, wind and rain, rain and wind, wind and rain … apart from the 2 hou...

I was slightly worried how long it would take to recover from my double header, especially as I was slightly sick. I usually recover very qu...

I decided to up the ante once more and increase the distance for my double header. Last week I did 17 and 20 miles, this time I was aiming f...