Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner

Photo by Marcus Howlett It's been a busy few days. On Thursday evening I headed to Tralee to give a talk about training for the upco...

It's time for another update, I guess. The legs had their usual post-race heaviness on Monday, though I could not help but notice that a...

Last year, exactly one week after the Tralee marathon, there was a local 5k/10k fundraiser at the school just around the corner from here. D...

I was quite surprised when I read a fair amount of criticism of Sunday's Tralee marathon. I really enjoyed the race but others have foun...

March 15 is an ominous date if you're into history. Luckily, I'm no dictator, though there was indeed scope for potential doom becau...

You would have thought I know by now what time I should set my alarm to for a 10 mile run; after all I must have done hundreds of those in t...

With the back-to-back marathons still only a week ago I had a fairly low mileage weekend. I wasn't even remotely tempted by the 3-in-2 w...

I haven't been feeling well for long stretches of this training cycle. I did not do myself any favours by getting a bit ahead of myself ...

This was always planned as the biggest training weekend before the championships. Six weeks out seems just about perfect for a big weekend, ...

"You're not giving up sugar for lent this year". It almost sounded like an accusation. Niamh has gotten used to my yearly suga...

I'm starting to get neurotic about my training. I'm flip flopping between thinking that I need to do more as Turin is approaching ra...

The legs really did not feel like running on Sunday morning. That was no great surprise, the day after a tough 50k was always going to a bit...

I awoke on Friday morning at around 3:30 and immediately regretted it. My head hurt, my heart was racing, I was sweating bucket loads and I ...

Saturday night was not a good one. I might have thought I was dealing with the car crash reasonably well but once I wanted to go to sleep, s...

This was supposed to be almost a carbon copy of the day two weeks ago. I got up early morning, got ready, got into the car still before 6 o...

Following a rather heavy weekend load, Monday and Tuesday were always going to be easy runs, though I did raise an eyebrow after each run wh...

Finally, a post just about running. About 4 years ago, MC set me a set of distances/paces that he thought I should be able to run as part ...