New Forest marathon

I wasn't feeling terribly well at the start of the New Forest marathon: over the past week, I'd had late boozy nights almost every night with not enough sleep or taking care of myself. The energy levels have been feeling very low for a while now, and it's getting increasingly hard to keep the calorie intake up. The more tired and run down I get, the less inspiring the trip to the supermarket, cooking and eating becomes. It's something I do need to sort out before the TiT, and perhaps quite urgently.

I'd topped up the training with a 14 miler on Saturday morning (meant to be 8 but it was a lovely day, I was in a great mood and got a bit carried away), then gone to the Fetch mile. One of the reasons why I do marathons is because I'm not a fast runner, and have little acceleration. Breaking 7 minutes over the mile seemed to be fairly ambitious but Riel had other ideas and told me he was going to pace me to 6'30 and wasn't taking any argument. The first few steps were terrifying, there was no way I could keep this up over 100m, but Riel wasn't going to let me slack off so I hung on for dear life, breathing like a carthorse by the penultimate lap and finally collapsing over the finish line in 6 minutes 33 seconds as close to death as it is possible to get. I may be avoiding these in future... It was quite nice to have my tortoise nature confirmed in the 100m we did later on - of the 12 of us there, I may have been the 4th quickest over the mile, but I was definitively the slowest of the lot over the 100m.


Why don't proper affleets need to recover like this??

I'm not sure how much the mile took out of me for the marathon, that intensity is something I'm not used to, but I just told myself I need to get used to running on tired and sore legs, and even while feeling a bit under the weather. The first 9 or so miles were great, I felt very strong and relaxed and the pace was comfortably sub 8'30 per mile. With a bit of time in the bank, I could even go for another 3'50 I thought. By mile 10, my guts started to protest so I ducked into the forest by the side of the road. That was the beginning of the end, all my energy seemed to have leached out of me and I was having to dig in to maintain the pace. Digging in so early isn't part of the game plan, ever.

The course is absolutely stunning, but unfortunately I couldn't appreciate it fully as all my mental and physical energy was concentrated on keeping my legs turning over. The views were fabulous, I think, and there were lots of ponies around but I had the tunnel vision back and couldn't see much beyond a few feet of tarmac ahead of me. By mile 15 or 16, we were up on the top of the moor in the blazing sunshine, but I was freezing now and covered in goosebumps. Another bad sign.. There were still a few minutes in the bank if I could keep up with 9 minute miles, but the route now became hillier and I was really struggling, taking my first walk break up the hill at 17, and having to stop for a minute or two at the 18 mile water station to try to get some blood back in my head to stop feeling like I was about to faint. It was at that point I lost the 4 hours and it was desperately disappointing, I felt so angry with myself for not pushing harder.

The tactic for the rest of the race was to walk the uphills and run the flats and downs and this seemed to work, although the cravings for any liquid that wasn't water were getting really strong. Lucozade, orange juice and soda water, a pint of bitter, any would have done as the water now wasn't any benefit other than to rinse my mouth out. Luckily, the repeated marathons are really paying off now, those 7 miles were horrible but at least they seemed to pass quickly. It's not often that you see so many people struggling in a marathon this size, I was really surprised to see so many people walking flat stretches. It's not so unusual in a big city race where people aren't so experienced, but this is a fairly small club marathon and not an excessively tough course and, while it was sunny, it wasn't that hot.

By the last mile however, my watch told me that sub 4'15 was well within reach and a sub 4'10 was possible if I really floored it. I remembered the mile time trial and knew I could push harder than I used to think possible only 24 hours before. An almost 8 minute mile and it was done, 4'09'26.

I'm disappointed with that time but putting it into perspective, I averaged sub 4 hours for each of my 4 marathons in September, with a total of 15 hours 43 minutes for the 4. So it's game on for the TiT, and the learning points are slowly identifying themselves. Message from this week? Rest more, and get the nutrition sorted.