Update On The Knee

Right. The situation is not good. Here is my week so far.

Friday: 2 miles treadmill/30 mins cycling/30 mins cross trainer. The knee felt alright but felt sore on the treadmill.

Saturday: 0.5 miles treadmill/30 mins cycling/30 mins cross trainer. The knee is alright but the legs are a bit tired.
Sunday: Rest.

Monday: Rest. Did 100 pressups/situps/planks and side planks.

Tuesday: Rest. Legs feel fine.

Wednesday: 3 mile run. My legs felt really good. No tiredness or tightness and it felt really good to be running. I thought that I had got away with it and thought I had won. Injury nil, me one. However, all my hopes faded at about 2 miles and within quarter of a mile I was reduced to walking. Walked the last mile and iced the knee. Felt sorry for myself and ordered a kebab. I can’t run 2.6 miles let alone 26 miles.

Looks like my first marathon will be over before it has begun. I thought that getting to the finish line would be my ultimate achievement after 10 months of training. Now it looks like I won’t even be making the start line. If a race is seen as a test to measure the quality of one’s training then I have failed. In the next couple of weeks I will review exactly what went wrong and how I can avoid any future mistakes.

There is a slim chance that I might still be able to run the marathon. I am going to take a full seven days off from running. Then I will do two miles next Wednesday and then 4 hard miles on the Thursday. If I can do these two runs totally pain free then I will give the marathon a go. If there is any hint of knee trouble I will admit defeat and concentrate on a full recovery.

I am obviously quite upset about this whole situation as I was genuinely excited about running around Snowdon. In order to make sure I get back into training I have signed up for a half marathon in January and a 10k race in December. I want to stay committed to running and feel like I need the motivation to pull me out of my gloom and doom mood.

Bloody knee.

Cracks In The Clouds

Every runner gets injured. Even the ones who say they haven’t probably have and the ones that say they have definitely have. I am probably like everyone in that I go through stages of unrest after an injury has hit. The stages are denial, rage, depression, acceptance and renewed neurotic disequilibrium. Okay, so I got that from a book but it is just about right. Denial: I tried to run 10 miles whilst sort of knowing that my knee was shot. Rage: when I got back to the house I shouted at the dog for getting in my way and got angry at the freezer for hiding the ice. Depression: made myself a massive sympathy lunch which included chewy sweets and two packets of crisps. Acceptance: well I’m writing this blog entry aren’t I? And I don’t know what the last one is but I guess I’ll cover that tomorrow.

Of course, there is another stage to this process. The stage is blind bloody fear at the fact I have my first marathon in two weeks and I can’t even run a mile. Brilliant.

Throughout the year I’ve had a few niggles here and there. In fact the worse lay off through injury was done playing football when I busted my hamstrings. I have had to stop training just through tiredness but not really through injury. Nothing more than a few days. So, I am having a hard time at the moment through little injuries that are stopping me from running. Now, like I’ve said every runner gets injured so I am not going to whine. Sure, I feel annoyed and worried but I am not going to moan and complain. Shit happens.

However, I am going to do some detective work. I want to find out why my legs have been falling apart. I was running well up until a month ago then the wheels came off. So what exactly is wrong?

1. Plantar Faciitis on my left foot that was only getting worse. It went away but then came back after a week and seems to take 3-4 days to clear enough to run on.

2. My knee is a bit buggered. I went for a slow and easy seven mile yesterday which was very relaxing. Afterwards, I noticed a pain on the outside of my left knee which was exaggerated whenever I walked downstairs. Today, I started a 10 mile run and discovered pretty quickly that the knee was fucked. I was reduced to hobbling back through the front door. A sheepish 0.7 of a mile.

3. I have a continuing tightness in my right hamstring and both calf muscles. In fact, pain seems to come and go all over my legs. It isn’t too bad but it does make any running uncomfortable at one stage or other.

Right then, on to the reasons.

1. My last good, strong run was 20 miles. I ran it faster and more comfortably than I expected and it is possible that this just knackered my legs. It is only the second time I have run that far and maybe it just took too much out of me.

2. After that 20 mile run I changed my shoes. My old shoes were quite worn and had covered about 550 miles. With the unused cushioning, the new shoes feel quite different and I can feel that my gait is slightly changed when running in them.

3. The third reason could just be simple overtraining. I have only been doing 3-4 sessions per week but in those sessions I have been working very hard. I might just need to reduce the intensity of my hard sessions.

I would not like to say that there is one particular reason but in all probability a mixture of all three. With a marathon in two weeks I need to sort this out quickly. Two of the problems sort themselves out. I am not doing any more long runs or intense sessions before the marathon. On the shoe front, I am going to start using my old shoes again. I don’t have the time to get my gait analysed and work out if the new shoes are the main source of the problem. I am going to stick with what I know.

With regards to my recuperation I am not going to do any running for the next few days. I will do some gentle cross training and see how I am at the weekend. I have to stay sensible, take each day at a time and try not start climbing up the walls. Rest, ice, compression and elevation seems to be tried and tested. I now have a very cold knee.

I might get a haircut. That should make me lighter on my feet. It is difficult to run sensibly with a massive ginger afro.

Trying Too Hard

Righto. The last month has been...interesting. My last post described in plenty of over the top detail how much pain I found myself in after my long runs. For my last 20 mile run I wanted to avoid hitting wall so I ate like a monster the day before and had a good breakfast. I ran a 02:10:00 half marathon which felt like a breeze. This was where I was expecting my legs to turn into stone. Mile after mile I was waiting and waiting for a pain that never surfaced. This is the first time I have dodged the dreaded wall in my long runs. Sure, the last 5 miles were hard with plenty of aches and pains but I managed a good, consistent pace. I went home feeling very chuffed with myself. Smug, you might say.

The downside is that that was two weeks ago and my body is still recovering. Soon after that 20 miler I developed a bit of plantar fasciitis in my foot. Nothing too painful but it does rear its ugly head every time I run a hard session and seems to get worse as a run progresses. This is a little worrying as I have my first marathon in three weeks. I think it will be alright but did cause me to abort my planned 20 mile run last weekend. When the first five miles is uncomfortable there is no way of getting to mile 20. This was a bit annoying as I wanted to do one last long run before the marathon but shit happens right. I know I can run 20 miles fairly comfortably so I have that confidence in my endurance capability.

I have been working hard on my tempo runs and hill intervals. I am consistently getting faster run after run and am fairly confident that I could pull out a sub 50 minute 10k if needed. I have been using the treadmill to do hill reps. Although I live in quite a hilly area I find the treadmill useful to do long hill running. I am tired though.

I think I might be working a bit too hard. My sessions are very intense and I often have to skip my recovery runs as I’m just too tired to get out there. This is reducing my number of runs to three or four times a week. Although I feel fitter and stronger I am struggling with stiff legs and little niggles. I am getting my key training sessions in but am paying the price a little bit at the moment. I am still a relative novice at running and sometimes it takes an injury or an overwhelming sense of tiredness to remind me of that fact. I am fairly certain I will recover fully for the marathon and am really excited about it but I do feel like it’s time to taper. In future I will try and cut down on the intensity of my sessions slightly. This will give me more energy to fit in a couple more sessions a week. I do need to remind myself of my goals every so often in that I want to increase my volume of low intensity exercise rather than increase the intensity of exercise hence reducing volume.

September was a tricky month. With all sorts of family commitments it was tough to produce consistent training sessions. To make up for this I have been overcompensating by trying to do too much on my hard training days. Nothing I can do about that now but as with all these mistakes it is important for me to recognise them and to learn from them. All the intense, hard training work has been done and I am now almost ready to run my first marathon.

Oh, and new shoes.

Dead Legs

I have found that it is around mile 16 of my training runs that my legs stop working. All the running information in well meant books or glossy magazines does not quite prepare the novice runner for the pain that comes with this failure. As a beginner you are advised that if pain surfaces and slowly gets worse then it is best to stop and take a day off. Indeed, this is a common sign of overtraining or ill health. But what happens when you know that to complete your goal pain is a necessary symptom. In fact, part of the process is to become used to the pain and to overcome the fear of it. My past two long runs have been 18 and 20 miles. They were the longest I have ever run and hurt like hell.

After the Newark half marathon I took around a week to recover properly. I started to focus on tempo work and hill work but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to get out and do the long runs. This is the problem I have with races. The success of completing a long distance race gives my brain an excuse for lethargy. You see, my brain is much cleverer than me. It finds reasons to get my body out of training, from the weather to the type of dinner I had the night before, anything is an excuse. The important thing is that I finally went out and got back to the long training runs and last week did 20 miles. It was the first of my long runs that I decided to do in a loop format of 2.5 miles. This was to include a series of inclines and declines that I knew would be testing and might simulate the challenges of the Snowdon marathon. It would also allow me to have my drink bottles roadside meaning I could run without a backpack.

The first ten miles flew by quickly and I kept a steady pace up to about mile 15. The pain started slowly and was just the aching that comes with being on ones feet for a while. As I progressed the aching became tangible and spread from my feet throughout both my legs. Soon every step was painful and my pace dropped considerably. Each footstep slapped the ground, devoid of grace and smoothness. The last three miles of this training run were by far the most extended physical pain I have ever been through. Even with a warm down, the pain took a half hour to subside. Post run I was curled up on the sofa, rocking like a small child. Teeth gritted and sweaty, the pain left me leaving only exhaustion and hunger.

I have never considered myself as tough person but the physical discomfort on these longer runs has taken me by surprise. I think what I have been encountering is stupidly known as “the wall”. If that was a wall then I’m the next Gebrselassie. More like an ever deepening quagmire filled with acid. Ok, not such a snappy phrase but much more accurate. I have been concentrating so much on my nutrition and hydration during my runs I have been neglecting the rest of my diet. I need to eat more the night before and morning of these runs. This will hopefully minimise my discomfort and exhaustion and if there is one thing I am quite happy to do, it is eating more. At the moment I am alternating between 45 mile and 20 mile weeks to avoid overtraining. My legs are feeling strong and I am feeling fitter than ever.



Yesterday, I went on my first proper fell run. Getting out onto the fells and the mountains has always been an addition I wanted to make to my training. From reading books and watching videos on the matter, fell runners somehow seem tougher and more in touch with their environment than other athletes. They read the terrain and adapt to weather conditions. They are self sufficient and rely on wholesome things like sweet tea and cake to get them through runs. Forget about energy drinks and gels. That stuff’s for weaklings. It just seems a much more pure way for amateur runners to spend their time training. Anyway, I’ve been too much of a wimp to actually get out there on the mountains by myself. I can’t navigate for shit and have a fear of running off a cliff in the middle of fog and howling gales. I can’t get anyone to come with me because everyone thinks it’s a very stupid idea to go running up mountains (or hills or anywhere for that matter). However, I recently got a Garmin GPS device which has given me the confidence to actually get out there. I went for an 8 mile run up Moel Famau which was great fun. Slow on the way up then fast on the way down. I’m going to be doing a lot more of these runs as it was a genuine pleasure to get off the roads.



I’m really enjoying my running at the moment and for the first time ever I look forward to my next run. This is the most important time in my preparation for the Snowdon Marathon. I should be peaking in a few weeks time and I’m feeling good and strong already. There are two points which need to be addressed. First off, I need to tighten up my diet as it’s been a bad month on that front. I know what to do I just need to up the discipline a bit. Secondly, I need to fine tune my race plan in the last couple of long runs. With all this I should be able to avoid such painful long runs and be totally prepared for my first marathon.

Newark Half Marathon

Last Sunday I completed the Newark Half Marathon in a time of 02:02:30. This road race is held in and around the town of Newark-on-Trent on a flat course. I arrived with an hour to spare after a very long drive and got myself ready to run. I had decided to run with a waist pack this time as I wanted to bring my asthma inhaler as I have needed it on long runs in the past with all the pollen in the air. Also, it’s a handy place to keep gels, car keys and money. I also decided to run with my ipod to give me an extra boost. Usually, I don’t like the idea of listening to music in races but I thought I would give it a go. The first surprise on arriving in Newark was the temperature. The weather man had promised a moderate 19 degrees but on stepping out of the car I knew it was going to be a lot hotter.

My fuel before the race had been planned well in advance and on the whole I stuck to it well. My biggest problem last time I raced was an unfortunate and unplanned piss stop at about mile three. This was something I was keen to avoid and so I told myself I would rather be thirsty up until the first drinks station than to need to piss. So I stopped taking in any fluids two hours before the start of the race. Even though it was a hot day I think this worked well and I avoided any unnecessary stops.

I warmed up for ten minutes and did a bit of light stretching. As I stood on the start line I felt the heat of the sun beating down. I hadn’t even started moving and I was already sweating. It was going to be a hot one. We set off and after a bit of inevitable walking at the start due to Newark’s narrow streets I got into my stride. My target for this race had been to run between 8:30 and 8:50 minute miles. This would have given me a better time than my last half and would have given me proof that my training was making me a better runner. However, I hadn’t factored in the temperature and after the first mile my head was telling me that this was an unrealistic pace. However, my heart still wanted to go for it so for the first seven miles I ran at a fair old whack and was on track for a good time.


I got annoyed at mile five. My bloody ipod kept playing the same bloody music and discovered that last time it connected to the brain it decided only to sync one album. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good one album but I was looking forward to a bit of Cloudkicker to muscle me through the last few miles. Never mind.

It was at mile seven that I started to struggle. The heat was too much. I had to ease up. It was difficult to take that my race plan was now in ruins and I was just going to have to keep slogging on.


This is where I am most disappointed. Not at my physical performance but my mental performance. I don’t think I could have gone faster and I am sure I was working as hard as I could. What I should have done is used a bit of common sense to see if I could have overcome the problem. I should have really slowed down for a mile, cooled off and see how I felt then. If I was still too hot then so be it. I would have then forgotten about a PB and just enjoyed the rest of the race. If I was feeling cooler I could have then pushed a little harder in the last few miles. Hindsight is always a useful and humbling thing but I would have liked to think that I could have thought through the problem. Instead, the last six miles were a struggle. With the disappointment of going so slowly and the discomfort of being so damn hot I am just glad that I kept on running.


The last few hundred metres up to the finish were sheer bliss. With my customary sprint finish I managed to move past about ten people and it showed me that there was a lot left in my legs. Immediately after my last race all my leg muscles cramped making me walk funny. After this one they felt strong and if it wasn’t for the conditions I could have kept going for a few more miles. However, the priority at this stage was finding water. I almost had to push through the crowds hazily in search of something to drink. I couldn’t understand why all these people were getting in my way. Couldn’t they see I was dying! Damn them and their fully hydrated enjoyment of the race finish. Joking aside though, I would have probably killed a few people if I hadn’t found myself in possession of a large, cool pint of water. After getting my race my race t-shirt I found another pint of water and went in search of a sit down in the shade. Lovely. All done.

Newark seems like a nice place and complete with castle seems to offer the quaintness of a middle England town with the ever modern presence of Starbucks and the like. The market square and finish area where I was sat seemed a very pleasant place to spend a weekend afternoon especially after a good old 13 mile slog. The flat of Newark and its surrounding area is ideal for a half marathon which lures in runners like myself in search of personal bests. The course itself was pretty plain and uneventful. Pleasant but not surprising. I was a bit annoyed at cars making turns through gaps in the runners even though the roads were obviously closed. A runner in front of me was almost clattered by a right turning car. I also felt uneasy towards the end where there was a stretch of 50mph road that wasn’t coned off. I know that slightly smaller races like this can’t police everything but a few more people manning the traffic and a few more cones on the more dangerous roads should have been implemented.

Apart from the road safety thing the organisers had done a good job. There were plenty of extremely well manned water stations and the support from the locals was really great. I haven’t done many races so I don’t really know what is a standard level of support but it didn’t seem like there was more than a half mile stretch without support. People of all ages clapping and cheering from the road side really put a smile on my face especially towards the end when the rest of me just wanted to lie down in the shade. So, well done to the people of Newark. The people handing out pints of water at the finish area were also a godsend and whilst I would have liked a little medal or memento at the end I do like the t-shirt. Very nice.

As with all these strenuously physical endeavours the feelings of pain and thirst dissipate quickly as time passes by. This blog allows me to reflect on my performance and to try and discover what I’m doing right and wrong in my training and in my race. I always think that racing is an experiment to identify the shortcomings of my training program. With any experiment it is the analysis of the information gathered that is useful not the feelings of disappointment or accomplishment. Being disappointed with my time is meaningless without full consideration of my performance. Considering the conditions, I don’t think I could have run any faster but I am annoyed that I lost focus in the latter half of the race. The feelings of discomfort and tiredness should be treated as data by the brain in order to logically overcome a problem. I forgot this and failed to shrug off the discomfort I felt. I think that working on these sorts of mental strategies in training to deal with things when they go wrong should become more prominent. I would also like to focus more on tempo sessions and to put in race pace sections in my long slow runs. This should give me a greater capacity to maintain a good pace when I am tired. These are definitely things to think about and to work on.

All in all, my fitness and is improving and my weight is dropping. I have really started to manage my diet and have become better at listening to my body to avoid over training. I am keen to avoid the general feeling of exhaustion that I felt for weeks after my last half marathon and so am taking it pretty easy this week. As it happens, I feel pretty fresh and did a seven mile run yesterday which was very pleasant. My legs are still a little stiff so I am definitely not pushing it. Also, one of my toes is a bit sore because of a blood blister underneath the nail. Nothing too bad but I don’t want it to get infected or anything.

I have the Snowdon Marathon in three months and feel that the main areas of training should be tempo work, long hill reps and long distance endurance work. Also, I am going to try and do some off road stuff and possibly run up a few mountains. I like mountains.

Here’s to cooler temperatures and maybe a bit of rain.

Time to go Faster

It’s been a while since I written so let me start by saying that things are a lot better since my last post. I seem to have stopped getting ill then injured, then ill then injured. Because of this six week interruption I had to abandon a couple of shorter races that I had planned. This sucked but I simply wasn’t fit or prepared enough to complete them with any confidence. I think that being completely unsure of how my body is going to react in a race environment is the worst kind preparation.

Anyway, setback over. Since then my running has been going well. I have been ticking all the right training boxes. The speed and hill work is a bit of a chore but I enjoy the longer runs. My long run has been consistently around half marathon distance and my last LSD was at 14 miles, the longest I have ever run. Apart from a few hydration issues (needed to piss half way through) the run went very well. To be perfectly honest, when I got back I could have gone straight out the door for a five mile jog. My aerobic fitness is certainly improving and I seem to go through less physical problems throughout these runs. My other long runs (12-13 miles) were shorter but done in 25-30 degree (Celsius) heat. During these it was just a matter of hydrating well, taking in electrolytes and taking care not to push too hard. In general, I had no problems with the heat and completed the runs with no ill effect. I did start to feel quite cold near the end of one of these hot runs. This was a very strange although not unpleasant feeling in 28 degree heat. This was a sign that my internal thermostat was on the fritz and could have developed into heatstroke had the run been any longer. If this happens again in the heat, especially at longer distances, it would be good to stop running and cool off to avoid any adverse effects. I am pleased with these long runs as I have eliminated any walking and manage to do the distance at a pretty constant pace.

I have started doing core exercises almost every day. This is certainly helping to strengthen my abdominals and hopefully my back as well. I hope that down the line this will help improve my running form. Also, having got my diet under control I have started to lose some weight. Running is increasing my metabolism which is in turn making me very hungry. That coupled with the feeling that I deserved a few treats after training so hard meant that I just started to eat way too much. It’s early days but I think I have a bit more control over it now. This is important as I think that weight loss will have a big impact on my speed, endurance and resistance to injury.

I have to confess that I have missed a few workouts recently. This is due to life and general tiredness getting in the way. I feel guilty for missing them but every so often I have to remind myself that I am not an elite athlete and that the occasional lapse is allowed. I am training well at the moment and am doing three hours a day at the moment focusing on core strength, balance, flexibility, speed, endurance and running form. Having said that I do feel bad for missing workouts and when I feel guilty I make a list. So here’s my list:

1. DO NOT MISS A WORKOUT
If a session is missed then a substantial explanation of the reasons should be recorded in the training log. Whether the reason is tiredness, illness or a lack of motivation it will be invaluable information to avoid missing sessions in the future.
The goal here is to run the Snowdonia marathon in around four hours and to avoid injury and overtraining.

2. LOSE WEIGHT
This is a matter of sorting out my diet. The diet log helps me keep my calorie intake down but I still eat too much rubbish. What is needed is a change of attitude towards eating. Food is the fuel for training and I need to select the right fuels to keep my energy levels up. So here are the diet rules:

• Cut out refined sugar
• Cut out overly fatty foods
• Avoid dairy produce
• Avoid red meats
• Increase fruit and vegetable intake

If I keep my calorie intake at about 1900kcal and eat healthily then I should be able to keep my energy levels up whilst still losing weight. The goal here is to lose a stone (6.35kg) by the end of the year. This will significantly increase performance.

3. DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOL
Alcohol means a missed workout. Too much alcohol means two missed workouts. This is unacceptable. Drink water. The goal here is to abstain from alcohol until after the marathon.

4. GET 7-9 HOURS SLEEP
Within reason, more is better. The average should be eight hours with nine before a long run. The goal here is to ensure no less than seven hours a night as this will affect training.

So, I have the Newark Half Marathon in two weeks and will write more on this next week to explain my goals and to set out a race plan. Just realised that I haven’t included my training schedule on this blog so here it is.

Up & Then Down

I haven’t written anything in a while because it’s all gone to buggery. I don’t like writing when things are like this because it’s just a long rant with me complaining like a small child. I CAN’T RUN! WAAH! I’M RUBBISH AT RUNNING! SOB! So, I’ll try and keep this as short as possible.

After the Leeds Half I quite deservedly spent a week doing very little exercise. Full of enthusiasm, I constructed a new training program and started training again. I expected to be fit and full of energy after my week off. I just wanted to get out and start upping my pace and endurance. For all my confidence my legs just wouldn’t play ball. It felt like I was running in lead shoes. It soon became evident that my legs hadn’t recovered from the race and I sensibly decided to take it easy for the rest of the week. Then, according to Sod’s Law I got a stinking cold. So three weeks from the race and I’d only ran short slow runs and had not been able to train properly.

During this time I started playing five-aside football on a Fridays. I thought that this would help keep my fitness up during my dip in training. Unfortunately, I played a game after my cold abated and tore both hamstrings whilst sprinting for a ball. Fuck! I couldn’t walk right for a week let alone train. This last week I did some gentle runs but my hamstrings felt very tight and I didn’t want to push it. It’s now five weeks since the Leeds Half and I haven’t been able to do much speed work or any long endurance runs at all.

It’s annoying because I feel that my fitness is there but my legs or general health are competing to keep me from training. I’ve tried to keep cross training but there has been an inevitable decline in my fitness. Bum! Also, my diet has been all over the place. It seems I need the daily training sessions to help keep the calorie intake down.

There are things to learn from all of this. Firstly, being pretty new at running I think I have to accept that it’s going to take me slightly longer than expected to recover from races. This should have been accounted for in any training schedule. Secondly, getting ill happens. It’s depressing but that’s life. Thirdly, I don’t think that contact sports like football mix well with my running training. I like playing football but I like running more.

I’m off my feet for the next couple of days which will hopefully mean that my hamstrings will fully recover. Then I’ll go for an easy run to see how the legs are. If all goes well I will finally be able to start a proper training regime for the Snowdonia Marathon. Fingers crossed.