purplecat

Easily the most exciting thing to happen to me to today occurred while I was running through the park. As I did a loop around the lake I saw what looked like some kind of event. As I got close I realised it was a film crew and as I ran between them I saw someone in dungarees. Something about the outfit made me think "Ah, that must be an actor." About 100 yards further on I thought, "He looked a bit like Christopher Eccleston" and about 100 yards beyond that I thought, "You know I think it was Christopher Eccleston." I wasted a couple of hundred yards more debating whether to turn round, go back and start taking photos but decided instead to carry on, on my usual circuit and if they were still there in 25 minutes or so when I would pass that spot again, I would stop and take photos.

They were still there (and given it was almost midday at that point and really rather hot, I was not sorry to have an excuse to stop), though rather more obviously filming than earlier so I felt vaguely obliged to keep out of the way. Some school children had also been produced. Given Christopher Eccleston's get up and the fact there are a number of community gardens/raised beds in the park, some of which are sponsored by schools I'm guessing that this is a segment in a children's TV show about gardening (EDIT: though it occurs to me there is also a lake and there was a woman dressed as a pirate - so something to do with boating is also an option).

I'm pretty sure the woman in the red and white bobble hat is Julie Hesmondhalgh who played Judy Maddox in Kerblam! which doesn't quite make it doubly exciting, but does make it even more exciting.

So exciting that most of the pictures I took turned out to be of the ground (how did I manage that?), but this one came out plus a short video of Eccleston saying "What time do you call this?"

Feeling rather happier about things today. I've got over finishing slower than I'd have liked, and losing the medal, finishers' T-Shirt and running log and LOOK! I've got my official photos.

( Under the Cut )

I've packed. I have to collect my bib number, timing chip and kit bag from the expo tomorrow before 5pm (the instructions are very clear about this). My plan is to get a train down to London tomorrow and make my way to the expo before seeking out my hotel. Since I need to be able to fit all my possessions into a London Marathon kit bag, I'm travelling light. My entertainment for the evening will be my phone and ebook reader. Mind you, I'm still reading fanfic I loaded onto the ebook reader in January so I have hopes it will sustain me.

The week has been characterised by short easy runs (even the long run, at 8 miles, was shorter than the long runs I attempted before training started), leaving me free to worry about other things namely:

Nutrition: I have read a lot about carbo-loading, modern carbo-loading, carbo-loading myths and so on. As far as I can make out the trick is to have your liver well stocked with glycogen. As I understand it (and I didn't do O' level biology though B. did and G. is currently (assuming GCSEs are the same thing)), when exercising one burns through one's glycogen reserves and then start burning body fat (and at the moment when the glycogen reserve runs out you hit "the wall"). You can manufacture glycogen from anything, but carbohydrates are good since they pack a lot of calories into relatively little space. Anyway, I have been putting on weight steadily all week based on an enthusiastic diet of making sure I actually eat a carbohydrate rich food with every meal (plus one cinnamon roll), so I assume I'm OK on the glycogen front. Of course, I also want to avoid having too much solid stuff in my gut on actual race day (because I know things will start to shut down around 18 miles) and I will be away from home so with moderately less control over food. Yo Sushi is apparently offering free meals to runners. Not sure if that will help.

DLR Strike: In order to get to the expo to acquire bib, timing chip and kit bag, one has to take the Docklands Light Railway. This is a problem if it is on strike. I looked this up and found that the nearest Underground station to the Excel centre is only a 20 minute walk away and, well, if I can't walk for 20 minutes on Saturday things do not look good for running 26 miles on Sunday. So my plan was to walk - particularly once the London Marathon emailed me to say there would be a sign-posted walking route. However it looks like the strike has now been called off. I have an ancient Oyster Card with (or so the sticker I have put on it says) £3.70 credit, however I gather one can use contactless payment these days so the Oyster Card will be remaining at home. On race day my start line is at Blackheath which does not involve the DLR. Also I think I get free travel on race day if I have my bib with me.

The Heat: On Tuesday the official marathon line was all "who knows what will happen on Sunday, long term weather forecasts are tricksy beasts". By yesterday this had morphed to "hottest marathon on record. Do you really need to run in fancy dress?". They are a bit calmer now. The advice is to be more modest about your pacing goals. Now my goal was basically 7mph for the first two hours then see how its going and aim to come in under 4 hours. As far as I can tell looking at miscellaneous weather apps, it is no longer likely to be totally scorching on marathon day - the high appears to be about 21C, and rather lower when one takes wind chill into account - and that won't be reached until 2 hours into the run so I figure the plan remains the same: 7mph for two hours and then see how things are going.

Shelter phoned me during the week to find out how I was doing, which was mildly alarming. I feel mildly fraudulent about Shelter given that, if I had a charity place, I would have had to raise £2,000. Instead I seem to be getting the full "running for Shelter" perks for a 10th of that. Not that they won't be welcome. I think I'll be on my own at the end of the race and knowing there is a pub/restaurant nearby with folk who will help out (or at least supply massages) is reassuring.

KM run this week: 30.9
KM run in 2018: 616

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already, but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

In the end I ran 20km at the weekend (instead of 22 miles). I did the first 10km at my proposed marathon pace and then slowed down for the next 10. Even so I was pretty tired by the end but I keep reminding myself that in every race I've run I've managed a significantly faster speed over the distance than I have in practice, so this will probably work out OK. My ankle was hurting at the end so, following the advice of the masseuse, I fished some ice out of the freezer. However apparently I was doing this wrong (according to B.) and nothing else in the freezer would suffice (according to B.) so I gave up and had a bath and two ibuprofen instead. The ankle then rapidly improved, so much so that I'm reassured that cutting back the mileage a week early was definitely the right decision. To be on the safe side, however, I have invested in a gel pack which is currently sitting unused in the freezer (so that should the ankle hurt again after a run I can ice it in a B. approved fashion) and I dropped £72 on a new pair of trainers. I have a suspicion that the ankle injury was originally caused by a cheap pair of trainers I was wearing as a stop gap, and as my current more expensive pair are nearing the point where Strava is going to email me to get new ones I thought investing in a brand new pair (of the make and model I know I like) couldn't hurt anything except my wallet.

I was organising a conference in Liverpool Wednesday, Thursday, Friday this week which has complicated the training plan - or at least I kept having to sneak out of the conference to go to the gym. I felt vaguely embarrassed at telling the volunteers at the registration desk "I just need to go and spend 35 minutes on a treadmill, but you have my phone number if anything happens". I managed over 25,000 steps yesterday which seems like an awful lot even taking the 35 minutes on a treadmill into account. My legs were feeling a bit wobbly by bed time and my knee was making its presence felt this morning. I'm hoping this is just a minor aberration because I will be seriously annoyed if I survived 10 weeks of training only to do myself in walking the streets of Liverpool in search of a restaurant.

I need to remember to book train tickets to London. I am contemplating weekend first, if such a thing exists on trains to London. Once the train is booked, I think I'm all set...


KM run this week: 37.6
KM run in 2018: 539.7

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already, but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

And then it snowed again. However needs must, so I ran 20 miles in the snow. Thankfully it wasn't too bad and most of the paths were clear. However to be on the safe side I stuck to the park close to home and so, inevitably, ended up running around it 7 times which didn't actually feel as repetitive as I had feared. I felt a little wobbly and very tired once I was done (but that has been true the last three long runs and I think my knee is coping with them better as I go along) and, even though I had halved my intake of gels, I still had to rush into the loo once I got home. I think I will give the jelly babies another try for comparison purposes.

I had a visitor at work this week and so needed to journey to Liverpool every day. So the rest of my weekly runs were spent on a treadmill in the university gym. It is hard to say anything particularly interesting about treadmills, I can't even give an update on daytime telly because the jogging up and down makes it hard to read the subtitles. I think someone in the Liverpool area stole a beer keg using a baby's buggy.

KM run this week: 58.7
KM run in 2018: 447.4

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already, but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

I ran 16 miles on Sunday. I did not enjoy it. In theory the first and last four miles were supposed to be at my planned marathon pace. I just about managed mile 13 at marathon pace and then slowed dramatically because I was just so tired. Afterwards, I found I had managed to add a calf muscle that was threatening to spasm to my catalogue of aches and pains.

Tuesday's run, which was a bonkers sequence of fast intervals of various durations, was equally hard. I more or less managed the first sequence (2 minutes, 3 minutes, 4 minutes, 5 minutes) at my interval pace but was forced to do the second sequence more slowly.

It is probably fair to say I was feeling pretty down at this point. I even had toothache. However I watched one of the London Marathon motivational Facebook live events in which Martin Yelling smiles professionally and tells people that of course they can do this - though his smile did waver slightly when confronted with the question from someone who had a bone "problem" and had been told to rest up for four weeks and he rather strongly advised consulting a doctor and considering how practical running the marathon would be. Still it was reassuring to realise that lots of people were hitting a bit of a hump and that many had struggled to do any running at all last week because of the snow.

He had a physio with him who suggested heel drops for calf muscles, so I threw some of them into my daily stretches. I'd already added some balancing exercises to the stretches since I had a feeling that the ankle pains I've been having for some time were related to stability muscles and a suspicion that ankle weakness had contributed to whatever was wrong with my knee. Whatever is happening, just regular healing or the additional exercises, my knee is actually feeling at lot better as I type though I'm still walking a little bit funny. The physio also said that unless a pain was causing you to limp or otherwise alter your gait, you were probably OK to run through it when training which was a useful rule of thumb to bear in mind.



This is a photo of the moment where Jock Temple attempted to remove Katherine Switzer's race number. There are a surprising number of photos of the incident and its clear that both the man to her left and the man to her right got involved in keeping Temple away from her.


In honour of International Women's Day* the London Marathon announced yesterday that Katherine Switzer would be running. Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon with an official race number having entered under her initials**. This was at a time when it was generally believed that women were too fragile to manage the marathon distance and the longest competitive race for women was only a mile and a half. Famously a race official, Jock Temple, tried to remove her from the course and take her number though he was prevented by her fiance who was running with her (and, looking at the photos, by several other of the men around her). She's considered a pioneer in opening up marathon running to women. She's never run the London marathon though she did run a marathon in London as part of a campaign to get a women's marathon included in the Olympics. She will be runner 261 which is the number she wore back in 1967 in Boston. If all goes according to plan, I should be ahead of her most of the way around (judging by her recent marathon times), which is fair enough given I wasn't even born when she ran that marathon in Boston, though I shall be keeping my eye out for bib 261 anyway. Mind you I gather she says she always ends marathons these days with soaking wet shoulders because of all the women who come up, give her a hug and then weep all over her, so perhaps I should try to restrain myself, even if I do see her.

KM run this week: 50.4
KM run in 2018: 340.5

* International Men's Day is on the 19th November, before anyone asks.
** She was not the first woman to run the race. Bobbi Gibb ran without a number the year before (hiding in bushes near the start and then entering the race when about a third of the pack had passed).

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already, plus bonus £10 note found in the street* (much appreciated), but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

I was going to write about jelly babies (probably at length) this week. The training plan for the Sunday long run specified practicing "Hydration and Nutrition". Hydration I'm reasonably happy with but I've never eaten while running, in part because I know running anything like close to a meal (apart from, apparently, breakfast) gives me horrible indigestion. However all advice suggests you ought to eat something while running a marathon and most advice recommends either "protein gels" or jelly babies. Now "protein gel" does have an attractive futuristic sound to it (although information on how they taste ranges from "horrible" to "some have a flavour that is better than others") however, honestly? if the alternative is jelly babies the protein gels aren't going to get much of a look in.

According to the Internet, the human body can absorb between 30-60g carbohydrate per hour. According to the packet, 4 jelly babies contain 21g carbohydrate. This works out at 6-12 jelly babies per hour of running. I settled on 3 every 20 minutes. It was OK, I guess? I found them fiddly and annoying and 24 jelly babies take up a surprisingly large amount of space but it was definitely liveable with.

I was supposed to run 14 miles - this seemed like a big jump in distance to me given the long run at the end of the easy week barely made 5 miles and the long run the previous week was only 10 miles. Rule of thumb is you shouldn't increase your running distance by more than 10% per week, but I vaguely assumed, without checking, that I was having shorter runs earlier in the week to compensate. Anyway off I went, grumbling about jelly babies, on Sunday morning. At 12 miles my knee suddenly started hurting. I slowed to a walk. The knee was fine walking, so after 5 minutes I tentatively started running again and then stopped very quickly and walked home. It seemed to be mostly fine though twingeing occasionally. I elevated it a bit and took some ibuprofen then suddenly, halfway through cooking supper, I had the weirdest sensation of "I'm not sure this leg is actually weight-bearing". It wasn't pain and I didn't collapse to the floor or anything but the leg definitely wasn't right. By Monday morning I was having a return of the ankle pains that had been plaguing me the last few weeks and the knee protested every time I walked at a speed above "very slow". I've not run since. The knee is a lot better, in fact I barely notice it beyond a vague sensation that something isn't quite right but I'm dithering badly about what to do next. I shall probably try a slow (possibly long depending how things are feeling) run on Sunday and see where I am then.

KM run this week: 19.3km
KM run in 2018: 250.5

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt (which arrived this week) and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already (and at the moment, obviously, it's not entirely clear I'll be running at all), but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

Saturday was my 100th Park Run!!! I think it is fair to say that were it not for Park Run I would not currently be training for the London Marathon. For the uninitiated Park Run is a weekly 5km run in a park. It now runs in numerous parks in the UK and a surprising number world-wide. While it is keen to stress that it is a run not a race - it gives you personal timings, and position overall (at least at the park you ran) and by gender and age. Since there is nothing like points and prizes (or, it would seem, points anyway) for motivating me, Park Run is more or less single-handedly responsible for getting my 5km time down from around 33 minutes to under 23 minutes. The people I've met through park run, both as a runner and as a volunteer, are responsible for getting me into the larger slightly more competitive races and hence the London Marathon. Park Run is a big organisation and these days there are smaller more personal weekly runs you can get involved with, but my local Park Run at least is friendly, welcoming, unpretentious, low commitment and generally a very pleasant experience (well apart from the extensive puddles which are present about 6 months of the year and can lead to an encounter with the "Ditch of Doom" if you stray too far from the centre of the path). The training plan recommended a 25 minute Hill Run on Saturday - Manchester not being over-endowed with hills I was happy to substitute that for my 100th Park Run. At some point I will get a T-shirt commemorating the fact but since Park Run is perenially behind on T-shirts that could take a while.

On Sunday I ran 10 miles of which 4 were theoretically at my planned marathon pace (5:15 minutes per km). However since a) I made mess converting minutes per km to minutes per mile and b) it was icy and I prioritised remaining upright over maintaining pace I was slightly faster than easy on the 6 miles that were not at marathon pace and slightly slower than marathon pace on the 4 miles that were.

The rest of the week was marked as "easy" which I took gratefully since I also donated blood and visited my parents, neither of which circumstances are conducive to long intense runs. I ran 25 minutes at an easy pace on Tuesday and 35 minutes (20 easy, 15 steady) on Wednesday.

No trouble with my ankle at all this week. So hopefully it has sorted itself out. The easy running may have helped.

KM run this week: 40km
KM run in 2018: 182.8

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already, but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.