Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner

I already knew from Friday's faster run that my shape has gone up a notch or two, so I was quite looking forward to Tuesday's evalua...

If my former coach reads my previous post he will probably say straight away that my 14-seconds-per-mile improvement last week was down to a...

Doing at least one similar workout every week makes it possible to check your progress as the weeks of training are ticking by. It doesn...

I got a bit of a surprise when I looked at the HR graph from Sunday's XC race. Ignore the first 4 minutes, that was clearly the HRM not ...

For the last few years Michael from the club had tried me to get into cross country running. However, every time there was something else on...

I know the last few blog posts have been a little bit on the technical (ok, ok, geeky) side. Niamh usually tells me how she always skips the...

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 ...