Hello all. I write this blog post in a joyous mood. Only about 7 weeks to go until the London Marathon and I am starting to get very excited indeed.

Those of you who have followed my blog will know that I am nursing (and continue to nurse) an injured knee. It appears that it is not actually the knee that is injured, but a weak hamstring on my right leg that is causing the knee to hurt.

This is extremely good news because:

1. I can strengthen this hamstring up.
2. I can run without doing too much damage to my knee (I think).
3. I can put in place a plan to enable me to train successfully.

Now, dear reader, I know you are all screaming at your screens saying something like “but Snooky, you only have 7 weeks to train up. This is just not enough time”, and usually you would be right that 7 weeks is not enough time to train for a marathon. Alas, dear reader, on this occasion you have forgotten one important thing. My secret weapon. Bloody Mindedness.

Determination has seen me through tougher situations than I am in now, and determination will see me through again. I have written my training plan. 4 “runs a week”. Well when I say run, what I actually mean is walk/run, because I have been advised by Trevor (see previous post to learn all about him) that a walk/run strategy is the one for me. Run for 3 minutes, walk for 2 minutes. Keep repeating until the marathon is done.

So my training plan is to practice this exact strategy. I will be doing 3 lots of strength workouts per week too, so I have the maximum chance of success.

I am EXTREMELY confident this strategy will work to get me over the line, and also quietly confident that it could well be a record tarmac marathon pace for me. The reasoning behind this is down to simple mathematics.

Usually when I run marathons I start out at a good pace and then generally slow and slow and slow as I get more and more tired. What may be 5 min/km at the start, is probably more like 8 min/km at the end (or worse)

A walk run strategy will even this pace out. Bear with me for a bit of maths.

So as you can see we are in personal best territory. And this is whilst walk/running the entire thing, which my knee should handle and I should be able to train for.

If training goes well, I might be able to eek out the run portions a bit longer towards the end of the race and improve on this finish time, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

For the time being, it is time to hit the training hard, keep consistent with my strength training, diet, and run schedule and see where I get to.

I will blog about the 3 Peaks Challenge another day as there is a great story to tell with that, but for the time being I hope you are all enjoying the lovely heat we have in the UK at the moment (assuming you are in the UK) and I will be back soon.

TTFN

Snooky