Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner

Dear Wind! You have been here since Christmas, making your presence felt continuously, at times in a rather forceful manner. Please fuck o...

The weather Gods aren't entirely in the Christmas Spirit this year. The temperatures dropped close to 0 again but were accompanied by ic...

From tomorrow morning on it will get brighter again. Good thing too. As much as I like Winter (it's an Austrian thing), the lack of da...

The back-to-back marathons I ran 2 months ago in Monaghan had gone so well that when I saw that the EOI crowd was putting on a similar event...

This is not a race report. I'll wait for tomorrow's race before I start writing one. There's a hill in Howth. Actually, Howth ...

Winter is here. We even have the fields covered in white, though in Dublin at least that's frost at the moment, not snow. We did have sn...

One thing that has been slightly bugging me since moving here to Dublin is a distinct lack of hills on my running routes. Obviously I can se...

Thursday As mentioned last week, I have a new toy. Accidentally, really. All I was looking for was a replacement for the HRM I someho...

The main training strategy for this cycle so far has been to run one big, long training session per month, which means either a marathon, a ...

The timing was not ideal. Recovery from the Dublin marathon had taken a lot longer than I would have hoped and even though there had been so...

Came home first male but was beaten by the better woman into second overall. Started at an effort that felt very comfortable but turned out ...

Bump, pause, double bump. Bump, pause, double bump. Bump, pause, double bump. That's what my heart beat felt like pretty much all week. ...

I did more of the same reasonably easy miles on the weekend. They went the same as most of the other ones: I felt so-so. Not bad but I'm...

One thing I learned the last 2 weeks is that recovery from a 3:10 marathon is a completely different animal compared to recovery from a 3:30...

When you run a race, it is all about that one race, nothing else matters. But when you do a training run, the magic actually happens off-scr...

Going into the Dublin marathon I knew I was in pretty good shape. Once again, this was a training run so I was not going to run at a full ra...

Training had gone really well this week. I have noticed an up-and-down pattern at times but this week was undoubtedly an "up" one....

It looks like we skipped autumn this year and just went straight from summer into the winter storm season. I might have expected a little bi...

Most people have a pretty clear image in mind when they think of Ireland and the weather, and for a lot of time it is fairly accurate. Actua...

A friend of mine insists that bad things always come in threes, which is a really Irish thing to say. I don't believe in any of that cra...