Here’s part three of my training progress for the 2008 Flora London Marathon:
Since I last wrote, I’ve run another 50 miles, taking my total in the last 3½ months to over 100. I’m now over half way through my training, and it’s getting tough. The other week I ran 7 miles in 75 minutes, and I’m very pleased with that.
Before I can run 26.2 miles in April, I need to know I can run half that distance by early March, so I’ve entered the Adidas Half Marathon at Silverstone. I will be running in the footsteps of Lewis Hamilton! Before any Grand Prix he walks the circuit to familiarise himself with the course, so at some point he will have walked round Silverstone. I shall be running the same route, so will be able to get round faster than he did! I'll be running 4 and a bit laps of the world famous F1 course, at roughly 33 minutes a lap (hopefully!), which is about 32 minutes slower than the lap record of 1m18s (held by Michael Schumacher).
Hopefully I’ll be completely fit by then, so I can make the most of the 13.1 mile race as a warm-up for the real thing, as unfortunately I picked up an injury last week. I’ve been to the physio, and with his help I shall be back into full training very soon. The problem is that I have odd legs! One of my knees is slightly higher than the other, something I never knew about until I hurt my iliotibial band. I was worried I’d done some serious damage and my marathon was over for this year, but with the right training my physio is confident of my speedy recovery.
In order to improve my cross training, I’ve taken up swimming lessons with tfd in Grove. This should also help my leg get better, and it’s good all round cardiovascular exercise too!
As always you can keep up-to-date with all my training progress in my marathon blog at http://www.ulen.me.uk/
