Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner

It only feels like yesterday that I did my last evaluation workout. I'm not sure where all that time went. However, there was a signific...

I was never going to break any mileage records this week. The emphasis was clearly on recovery from the 30 miles on Sunday. I might not have...

Obviously, I've spent some some time in the last few days thinking about Sunday's race. There's no point hitting myself over the...

I went into this race with unclear targets. It was not a goal race, not even close. I don't run goal races 3 weeks after a marathon. I d...

30 mile race in Sixmilebridge, 3:35 (ish), 2nd place. Lost out in a sprint finish by a second. Spent some time in the ambulance, recoverin...

Evaluate: 1.  To ascertain or fix the value or worth of 2.  To examine and judge carefully; appraise This time there was a slightly bi...

On Thursday morning I knew that I was pushing the boundaries. After hill repeats on Tuesday and 15 hilly miles on Wednesday I was in definit...

I checked my logs from last year what I had done between Dublin and Sixmilebridge, and my first thought was that I had done a lot. Then I re...

Running a marathon as a training run for a marathon is fairly unusual, I admit. But having done a significant number of them, including sev...

And there was me smugly thinking I had done a perfect job when pacing the 3:15 group in Monday's marathon, when I get a comment from the...

October bank holiday Monday can only mean one thing, the marathon is back in town. Like the last two years I was donning my pacing gear in t...

I know I said in my last post that my 20 mile run had put me in an indefatigable state, but unfortunately that was not going to last. A few ...

The last thing I said in my previous post was that I would assess on Friday morning if I should do an easy or a faster effort that day, depe...

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...