One week to Frankfurt, one year since Amsterdam

Week ending 18^th October,

The last week of the taper starts tomorrow, a situation I have found myself in for the last 5 years now. It doesn’t get any easier, phantom pains, nerves, visualization , tactics and so on. 

What is different is that this is the probably the poorest trained marathon I have ever entered in that there are probably at least half a dozen things I would have liked to remedied for this one. In previous marathons (the good and the bad) I always felt I couldn’t have done anything differently in terms of training but this time I would have liked to done a lot more races/tempos/intervals and mileage. The stomach bug in August left me feeling pretty hopeless for most of August leaving me with the month of September to rebuild up my fitness and get into some sort of shape.

 I broke my training done to two key workouts- long runs on a Thursday and a marathon pace shorter “long run” on the Saturday or Sunday. I managed to complete 4 X 20 mile long runs (21,21,22,20.5). These went okish enough but the marathon pace runs went quite well – running the Charleville 13.1 half marathon in 1hr39min16seconds and 15 miles on my own at 7.40 pace. I also ran a number of 10 mile runs at similar pace every other weekend. The rest of my running was distilled to easy paced runs.

On the upside I do feel a lot more rested as I was only running 4 times a week so maybe that will prove beneficial to me. I can only do my best at this stage and hope the race goes well and post race recovery goes ok. I have two races in mind for the New Year and haven’t completely given up at a crack at another marathon in the first half of 2016.

3 runs this week. I had a cold and didn’t run from Monday to Wednesday. Thursday I ran 9 miles at around 7.55 pace and Saturday I ran 9 miles (14.5 km) at 7.40 pace. Today’s run was a easier 10 mile run with 7 miles run near the riverbank in Mallow in the company of Adrian, Caroline, Sharon and Peadar and the remaining few miles on my own.