Monday, July 29, 2013

The Road to Murcia

I would like to formally announce, to all 7 of my beloved followers, my candidature of marathon debutante in Murcia on November 3rd, 2013. It's taken a lot of soul-searching to decide to enter this race but in the end, boredom won out.

I've been running for about 2 and a half years now and like anyone I've had my ups and downs. In the end, I've decided these are no worse or better than anyone else's so I've kind of become a bit alienated from the running community. This is because I've realised that blogging about the mental aspects of running, as this blog attests, can be mind-numbingly boring. So I thought I'd just get on with it, enter the bloody race and see how it goes.

There are a couple of great things about this particular marathon that grabbed my attention. Firstly it's being organised by a club called 'Corre Birras' or 'The Running Beers'. Cool. Secondly, it's limited to 1,500 runners so there won't be big crowds to negotiate, which is something I am eternally grateful for. Third, it's Murcia's first marathon so I reckon there will be a pretty good atmosphere.

I've done four training sessions so far, using a time-training approach I've downloaded from micoach.com. It's really good. My sessions have included my first interval session (where my son came with me and played on my mobile while I ran up and down past him, high-fiving on the way), a mountain session where I fell over and gashed my knee (taking me back to my school days) and a two hour LSR that I'm still stiff as houses from. However, it was the beach session that really taught me a lesson. I won't say much about it except that no-one ever told me I had to wear underwear and not just run in my swimwear. Chinese water torture had nothing on it. I only got through it because I'm so mentally hard but there were some delicate moments for days afterwards.

The other great thing about running is I'm back in Cwmbran at the moment. Wales is a beautiful place and makes such a contrast to the grim desert heat of Alicante. You can see this by looking at the garmin routes below and changing the map to satellite mode:



The other thing about Cwmbran was the running in the rain. If I tried to do two hours in Alicante I would be stopping every 30 minutes to glug down 20 litres of water. In Cwmbran I did my 2 hour LSR without the need for any water and I got soaked into the bargain. I also got heckled by a car full of lads, who I gave the finger to, and a car full of girls, who I waved at. Oh, the mysterious vagaries of the mind.

Anyway, I'm underway. My ankle is hurting. I'm feeling positive. I'm blogging again. All 7 of you have my love if you could be bothered to get this far. Let me hear you say 'yeah!'