Update – Rich ran in 3 hours 44 minutes – fantastic!

Well it’s now less than 7 days until Marathon day and I’m hoping my training will pay off.

I hung up my Five Tens in exchange for a pair of running shoes at the end of November and started my training schedule for the Brighton Marathon.

Its my first attempt at a Marathon and with very little running experience it has been an eye opener. I started running gently through November, a few miles here and there and also joined a run club meeting twice a week for an hour. On boxing day I attempted my first ‘long’ run this was a 6 mile loop starting and finishing at my parents house in Melton Mowbray where I was spending Christmas. It didn’t go well at all and due to a horrible pain in my left knee I ended up walking the last mile and a half! I gave it a rest for a week and then started again, putting it down to “to much too soon”.

Through January and with proper instruction from the run club I started to be able to manage more miles and at the end of Jan I did my first successful ‘long’ run of 10 miles. This was from my house in hove to the marina and back, and I have to say I loved it and felt a real sense of achievement that I have not had for a long time. With my new found running confidence I entered the Brighton Half Marathon. I felt I should do it as a training aid for the full Marathon and also to get some experience of a race situation. Two weeks before the Half I decided to run the distance in practice, 13.1 Miles, which took me from my house to Shoreham and back, and it actually went quite well, although my knee pain, which I now know to be tendonitis, was continuing to cause me grief. Having ran the distance already I was confident on race day and luckily the weather was great. Overall it was a great experience although I started too close to the front of the field and as a result spent the first 5 miles being overtaken! This was off putting, demotivating and made it hard for me to pace myself. On the plus side it may of helped me to run faster as I finished in a respectable 1 Hour 40 mins, not bad when I think back to boxing day!

From then until now it has been a steady increase of mileage week by week, mixed with the odd bit of time off due to injuries, mainly the tendonitis, shin splints and a weird pain in my toes which comes and goes, probably my body just saying “what the hell are you doing to me!!”

I had been advised that prior to the Marathon you should never actually run the full 26 Miles in training and really the most should be 21, sticking to this advise I did my longest training run on the 18th of march in Stanmer Park of all places. It was and organised training run using a 5.2 Mile loop off road around the park. To me it felt like I was being tortured, not the running, but the fact that I was doing it in my mountain bike playground, surrounded by you lot on the trails, some of you may have seen us running around in our yellow bibs! yes that was me.

The weather that day was perfect and I managed 4 laps of the course in just over three hours which I was pleased with especially as each lap included the rocky climb from the tea rooms!

So with 5 Months of training under my belt, Im half a stone heavier and supposedly the fittest I have ever been, although my legs now hurt even when walking around the house!

Apart from my own sense of achievement, the reason for entering the Brighton Marathon was to raise money for a great local charity, Rockinghorse.

My older brother, Edward, was born severely disabled and as a family over the years we have benefited first hand from the amazing help and support of such charities. Rockinghorse in particular support local respite homes that give families a much needed break from caring for disabled children, this was a massive help to my parents when I was growing up that gave us rare opportunities to do normal family things that others may take for granted.

For more info about Rockinghorse visit: http://www.rockinghorse.org.uk/

If you would like to sponsor me you can do so at:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/richjustfeltlikerunning

Any donation you can make, no matter how small, will be much appreciated. Thank you

If you are around next Sunday and fancy giving me a cheer you can follow me using the brighton Marathon App, available on ipnones only. Enter my number (4718) to find me.

See you all again soon on the trails, whether all this running will have improved my cycling remains to be see!

Rich