Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner

Canute , a very experienced runner whose opinion I very much respect, left a very good comment on my most recent post. It's worth readin...

It's hard to figure out what works best for you. You can follow an online training plan, you can buy a book with training schedules or y...

A few hours after finishing Dingle I noticed a red mark on my chest; I hadn't noticed a thing during the race or immediately afterwards,...

18th September was the day this year. I ran in the morning, as I always do, and my hands felt freezing cold. For me, that one occasion alway...

I had a new experience on Saturday. I drove to the meeting point of the club's group run (usually I'd run, but I'm only just bac...

Time flies when you're having fun, especially my favourite kind of fun, out on the road. After taking 10 days off, there will now come a...

The one thing that had my attention over the weekend was the combined European/World 24 hours running championship race in Katowice, Poland....

Someone said to me last night, now that you have taken a break from running you have plenty of time to blog. I told him that I have nothing ...

Doesn't time fly? Dingle was already 4 days ago. My legs were in a fairly reasonable state following the race, there certainly was no co...

Going into this race I found it impossible to predict how it would go. Ultras can be hard to predict at the best of times of course, but my ...

7:01:41, 8th place. To put that into some sort of context, that time would have been good enough for second place last time round. Relentl...

36 hours to go. Normally I would write a post where I sum up my training at this stage, but there is little point in that. I ran 126 miles 8...

The week of Dingle has arrived, much too soon for my liking. But I always knew that 8 weeks would not be enough between Bangor and Dingle, a...

Robert Osfield left a comment: (I hope you don't mind, Robert) I'm curious, how does your pace/HR/Calories per mile match to what ...

I know Dingle is not my goal race by any means, but I still want to do as well as I can on my limited training since Bangor. That means I wi...

The first thing Ray O'Connor, the Connemara RD, said to me when he saw me at the briefing was "next year you'll be running....

After unexpectedly managing two runs in Clifden last week's mileage again touched the 80 mark, a lot more than I thought, but the easy p...

As you probably know, I had a great crew for my 24 hours race in Bangor 5 weeks ago. I still don't quite know why Jo offered to sacrific...

I only have a couple of minutes before I'm heading off for Connemara, so this will be short (hurrah says Ewen). The 100 mile race is on ...

Training never progresses in a straight line, at least not for me, but the ups and downs I have experienced since Bangor are definitely unus...