Tuesday, 7 February 2012

New shoes and cold feet.

I’ve had a rather eventful past weekend. I headed down to London early Saturday morning to attend the ‘Meet the Experts’ weekend hosted by the organisers of the London Marathon. This was basically a day of presentations from various marathon organisers, experts and former 10,000m world record holder David Beford, and the Olympic marathon runner, Liz Yelling.

The day had a rather bizarre ‘Harry Jogger’ theme and were given advice from a variety of ‘Jogwarts’ (get it!?) professors dressed in wizarding robes and wigs! Despite the somewhat dubious jokes, the day was both entertaining and informative. I'll fill you in on the most interesting bits on my next post.


There was also an Adidas stall where you could get your gait scanned to see what kind of running shoe you should be wearing. I knew from previous fittings that I over pronate slightly, meaning that my feet roll inwards as I run. If you don’t wear the correct kind of shoes this can result in pain and injury. For the scan I was required to run up and down a hall occasionally landing on a sensor which measured the angle and impact my foot hit the ground at. It was difficult to replicate my normal running style as I had to run barefoot and the floor was extremely slippery, but after a few attempts we got a usable reading.

The scan thankfully confirmed that I have been wearing the correct shoes for the past year, though my gait is completely different on each foot. Whilst my right heavily pronates, my left foot has a perfect, efficient neutral stride. There was 30% off running shoes that day, and as I will need to replace my current shoes towards the end of March, I brought myself some new ones! 



By far the most attractive running shoes I have owned so far!

After the presentations had finished I headed over to Shepherds Bush to watch a play with one of my oldest friends, Yasamin. The play was called 'Our New Girl', I would definitely recommend watching it if you are in the area. The play finished at 10pm and we began to make our way home. However the snow had other ideas...What should have been a simple journey ended up with us being stranded outside in the freezing cold until 4am as the entire London transport system had shut down! Not a good end to the night. By the time we finally made it back to Greenwich our feet were soaked through with the freezing cold snow and we were beginning to lose all feeling. Not the greatest end to the night!

I'm now off to the gym to do some hill training on the treadmill (it's bloody freezing outside), see you on Thursday for some tips from the weekends presentations and more tales from my training!

xxx

Friday, 3 February 2012

First Week of Training!

Well hello there! It’s been a while hasn’t it?

Since I last wrote, my marathon training has properly begun. The first week of my plan has included a couple of interval sessions, short runs and a 12 miler. It’s been a pretty good week aside from the fact I have chillblanes (a rash caused by exposure to the cold) on both my shins which are really quite painful!

Last Sunday’s 12 miles was the longest run I have done since Christmas Eve, which is a long time ago! I covered the distance in 1 hour 57 minutes, it was a slow and hard run, made worse by the fact that I took a wrong turn about 3 miles in that resulted in me running 1 and half miles up an extremely steep hill. Not fun, I felt like I was about to keel over! Once I finally got back on track the run improved. The last 6 miles took me through the grounds of Kirkstall Abbey and along the canal back to Leeds and despite getting freezing cold feet from all the icy puddles on the path, was actually quite nice.

Sunday was also my first time using energy gel on a run. One problem I have found on many of my long runs is that I get about an hour in and my legs begin to feel heavy and my energy levels drop dramatically. This something that I am keen to address. The marathon will involve roughly 4 hours of running so being properly fueled is extremely important. On Sunday’s run I took an SIS tropical flavored Gel. It was odd, I wouldn’t say I liked the flavor (or texture for that matter) but it did feel like it gave me a bit of a boost after the massive hill. From now on I am going to try and use Lucozade products as these will be supplied for free on marathon day!

The rest of the week went as follows:

Monday: 5miles – 47.04 minutes

Tuesday: 7.3 miles – 1 hour 7 minutes

Wednesday: Interval session 3 minutes hard followed by 1 minutes rest, 6 times (this was pretty killer!)

Thursday: 6 miles – 57 minutes

I have a (hopefully fast) 6 miles planned for this afternoon, and then I’m off to London for the weekend to see a friend and attend a session called ‘Meet the Experts’ presented by some former Olympians including Liz Yelling to learn about training and fueling for endurance events, so that should be interesting.

My blogs will become much more regular now that my training has properly started (I'll be running more often for one!)

See you Monday!

xxx