Clothing is now causing me obsessive concern following a deterioration in the forecast.
All week it’s been showing Sunday as 14 C, sunshine and light southerly wind (perfect).
Now suddenly it shows 11 C, rain and wind.
Meltdown scenario.
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Posted in 2004, the marathon journey
I’m just four days away from the London Marathon.
Four months of training have somehow shrunk to four days and a single two mile jog.
If I can think of little else but the race on 18th April, it seems a good time to take my mind off the road ahead, and to look back on the journey that has brought me here.
It’s a journey that started on The Embankment one chilly night in early December, as I left a party at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. I walked across the floodlit Millennium Bridge to admire the view.
That reflective walk brought me eventually onto the London Marathon course, as I walked, dreamed and finally had to run to catch my train from Waterloo station.
A whole winter and a passage into spring have gone by since then, and I’ve experienced it all. The highlights and lowlights of just one season in one lifetime.
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Posted in 2004, the marathon journey
Spring in England really is a magical time. Whenever I’m running out in the countryside, through the parks, or just about anywhere at this time of year, it is easy to appreciate Chaucer’s love of April:
When, in April, sweet showers fall
And pierce the drought of March,
And bathe the vein and root
Of every plant with such liquor
That genders forth the flowers,
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Posted in 2004, life and times, Surrey and Sussex
If marathon training is full of contradictions, then it should be no surprise that rather than building relentlessly towards race day, the last three weeks actually comprise a taper of easing training levels, designed to build up strength before the race itself.
It’s certainly good to take things a little easier after the exertions of some tough training weeks.
But sometimes I feel that it’s taken fifteen weeks to get progressively fitter, and that these three weeks will simply be enough to lose all that fitness again.
Fortunately, I know that this feeling places me right on track. The taper may not be the hardest part of a marathon training programme, but the experts say it is definitely the most important. Continue reading
My computer hard disk crashed yesterday, which seemed appropriate. It wasn’t the only hardware that was suffering.
The Bath Half Marathon last week gave me a useful opportunity to experience the thrill of racing again, and to assess my fitness levels.
The appalling weather also offered a good ‘dry run’ (if that’s the correct word) for running a race in the wet, if that’s the weather which should be served up by the London Marathon.
A successful day, but I’ve paid for it since. My legs have been stiff and heavy. My motivation’s been tested, and found wanting. Hell, I felt tired. I still do.
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Welcome to Bath – UNESCO World Heritage Site‘ – reads the roadsign, rather incongruously greeting the weary traveller at this dull spot between the railway line and the Texaco garage. Four miles have gone by in the lashing rain and there are another nine to go in the Bath Half Marathon.
Bath is famous for its hot springs, and there is no doubt at all that the aquifer is being fully recharged in the foggy hills around the town. The goddess Minerva presided over the Roman baths built here, and the weather she’s organised is extracting a bitter revenge on the runners gathered for the race. Even the glorious pale gold of the Bath stone mansions in Great Pultney Street had looked a bit drab as we’d shivered back at the start line, waiting for a delay just long enough for the rain to arrive.
All that Georgian architecture is far behind us here, and a third of the race is already run. Continue reading
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roads of stone 