Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner

They used to be so cute, 15 years ago! Coming home from Wicklow on Sunday my thoughts turned towards the following weeks. The next 6 wee...

Svein and Barry When, a few weeks ago, I stumbled over an open invitation by nutritionist and ultra runner Barry Murray for a weekend ...

If you ever want some good photos of yourself and you happen to be in the Northwest of England, you could do a lot worse than contact Mart...

People keep congratulating me on my time in Manchester and I keep feeling like an ungrateful sod because I don't really want to be congr...

There isn't an awful lot to say, really. I missed my target by a fairly small margin but I had gotten over that within a minute of finis...

In one way it was the perfect weekend: City on Saturday, marathon on Sunday. In another way it wasn’t entirely ideal: with the race number ...

City won 2:1. I ran 3:01:02. Delighted with the first, obviously slightly disappointed with the second one. Was just that little bit too...

Tapering. I have to be honest, I'm not a great fan of it. It's not that I don't appreciate the fact that it gets the fatigue out...

Tapering for a marathon is as much an art as it is science and there are plenty of different basic strategies. Most, but not all, show a ste...

Calling Monday's run the last workout was a bit premature, I suppose. A lot of marathon plans have a workout 10 days before race days, a...

So, the good news is that on Saturday and Sunday I started feeling good again. Really good, just like when I'm about to get into really ...

I'm not entirely sure how I got bounced into this but I ended up racing on three consecutive weekends, Ballycotton, Tralee and the count...

I only heard about the Kerry 5k road championships being on this weekend last Friday, and my first reaction was to groan. Actually, that was...

Comfortably keeping alive my streak of looking awful in every single running photo ... Last week someone mentioned to me that my traini...

Today was my 75th marathon. A few months back, when I first drew up my racing schedule for 2016, I pencilled in Tralee as my goal marath...

... and then I move on: 1) someone asked how my HR compares with previous races there. I averaged 171 last week compared to 172 in 2014. P...

Obviously, Thursday's workout was followed by 2 easy days,. That would have been the case in any situation but with Sunday's race in...

I probably should give some kind of explanation for my last post. It's a long story and there is much more to it than I would ever div...

I am actually surprised I'm still standing, never mind being able to run tough long workouts. As of now I have been without proper sleep...

I felt pretty much destroyed after Sunday's run and was more than a bit worried how my training was going in general as well as how I wo...