I've Got This. Apparently

So I set out in London on a marathon yesterday. It seemed to take forever, and it was hard work, but I made it in the end.
No, not THE marathon. Obviously. The marathon journey on public transport across the city to EXCEL, the exhibition site in the back of beyond (east London, actually - ed.) where all the entrants have to pick up their race number, timer token and literally whatever free stuff they can bung in their bag and carry home with them. 
It's basically a device to get you to visit what amounts to the Virgin Money London Marathon 2019 Expo, a manoeuvre which would normally activate me into automatic cynicism mode. But as I walked up from the station, with lots of other excited entrants, and saw the banners with slogans like "You're all amazing" and "Nervous yet?", I couldn't help feeling a little emotional. 
So much so that when I picked up my race number, I actually got a little teary and had to sit down for a little and compose myself. What's that? No, YOU'RE crying because you've just realised there's no going back now and you're actually going to do this amazing thing.

The exhibition itself was the usual melange of marketing, merchandise and photo opps. I resisted the urge to buy anything (though I do seem to have signed up for the opportunity to do yoga in Costa Rica, which is faintly troubling), got my photo with Mo Farah (well, a cardboard cutout of him - the real one was still involved in some beef with his fellow elite athletes about a stolen watch, it seems), and took up the challenge of running at world record marathon pace for 400 metres.
Ever tried doing that? It's harder than it looks. A lot harder. They put you on a huge treadmill, and set you off at a reasonably comfortable pace, before whacking it up to 12.89mph. Phwaaaaaaaahh. My legs started going round like Roadrunner's when Wile E. Coyote's bearing down on him with one of his more fiendishly ingenious Acme contraptions. I had to keep my eyes looking down straight at my feet to make sure I didn't fall over them. After what seemed like about 3 hours, with my legs turning to jelly, the nice young lady in charge of the thing called out "Give Rob a big cheer, folks, he's halfway through". You what?

Look out, Wile E Coyote's coming

Halfway through 400 metres? I thought I'd reached Greenwich at least. Finally it reached the end. I'd done a quarter of a mile at Mo's (well, actually, Eliud Kipchoge's) pace. The idea of going that fast for any longer, let alone 26.2 miles, is literally insane.
Leaving the exhibition, I saw a banner saying "You've made it. You're ready. You've got this". I admired the banner-writer's confidence in me. Really not sure I have got this, unless "this" is a nagging sense of inadequacy and a general sense of impending doom.
Despite that, however, my final preparations for the Big Day are now in full swing. My name has now been successfully ironed on to my running vest. My number is safety-pinned on likewise. And my timing token is, after a great deal of effort and swearing, attached to my left trainer. I've never been able to do this with ease. The little plastic ties they give you never seem long enough, while the instructions with the "helpful" drawings are about as clear as an Ikea manual in Mandarin Chinese. And yet the proper runners always seems to have their timer tokens impeccably secured. I often wonder if in the pre-race preparations, they glance down at my miserable effort and sneer knowingly. 

Someone has faith in me anyway

My carb-loading is in full fettle (do Easter eggs count?). I read a guide called "Five Good Ways To Carb-load", of which number 2 involved eating a lot of beetroot. Err no. Bollocks to beetroot. Number 5, however, proposed putting honey in your tea or coffee, a menu suggestion that I have been enthusiastically carb-loading the bejeesus out of ever since.
I have also been reading a lot of serious guides about How To Run The London Marathon, which perhaps I should have been reading a little earlier. The one thing I have gleaned from all of them is not to go off too fast at the start. No danger of that given my performance on the EXCEL treadmill, you might think, and you're probably right. But actually, I do have a tendency to start too fast for my own good, even if "fast" is pretty much a relative concept in this case. So I will try to keep myself in control.
Most importantly, my sponsorship is now complete. More than complete, in fact. Thanks to the many lovely people who have more confidence in me finishing the damn thing than I do myself, we've raised well over £1000 for the Motor Neurone Disease Association - and if you feel like adding to that admirable total, you can at this Justgiving link. A huge thank you to everyone who has.
So I suppose in a way, the banner was right. I have made it. I am ready. And I really have, despite my pessimistic qualms, got this. No matter what happens on Sunday, I've made it through all the training to get to this point, I'm as ready as I'm ever likely to be, and above all, I've got my fund-raising target - got the money to combat the disease that killed my friend. Didn't think I'd manage any of it and yet here we are.
Just the 26.2 miles to knock off now. Piece of cake.

And Now We Taper

Did a 20-mile run last week, lads. Nothing special. No big deal. Just part of the training. Just the big two-oh. Just the 32.3 kilometres. Just the six parkruns one after another, and then another half. I've had worse.
That's a lie. I've never had worse. At the end of the 20, I was hurting so much I felt like I was going to cry. Except I didn't have enough energy left to cry. I hardly had the energy to walk home. Stretches? Forget it. Couldn't lift my legs. My muscles practically screaming at me. Back of my knees felt like they were held together by two elastic bands stretched to way beyond their capability. I got home, collapsed into a hot bath (yes, I KNOW it's supposed to be an ice bath, but there's only so much agony I can face in one day) and contemplated what manner of stupidity had got me into all this.

Except... except maybe it wasn't so bad after all. It might have hurt like crazy, but I DID manage the 20 miles. I DID keep on going even when at 16 miles I thought I couldn't physically run another step. And my favourite moment - some joker in the park knocking back a can of Stella who came up to me after I was finished and said "Come on, jog with me", the look on his face when I told him I couldn't because I'd just run 20 miles. Now that was a look of respect! OK, it was from a park-bench alky who'd have trouble running a bar tab, but still.
And now? And now we taper. The four most beautiful words in the English language. The training runs continue, but the distances get shorter, the pace gets less strenuous, and the physical demands on my body get less... well, less demanding. The next fortnight is dedicated to not doing anything stupid, steering clear of any injuries and maintaining what I laughably describe as my peak physical condition. As the multitude of helpful marathon preparation guides keep reminding me, I can't get any fitter for the marathon over the next two weeks. Whatever level of ability I possess right now, that's as good as it's going to get.
So now I can concentrate on some of the little things that I've been pushing to the back of my mind. Like raising more sponsorship (little reminder - the link's right here ). Like examining the course and working out where the water stations are. Like ironing my name on to the front of my running vest (the first race I did this for, I lovingly applied the letters R-O-B to my vest, making sure they were perfect and even, only to realise I'd stuck them on to the back rather than the front - which is not much use if you're hoping people are going to cheer you on as you run towards them). 
One other thing I'm determined to make time for is getting my marathon haircut. Well, you want to at least try and look good in the official photos. For the last couple of weeks, my hair's been getting floppier and floppier, and as you can see from the photo above, that doesn't make for a good look at the end of a long run. After a couple of dozen kilometres, my hair is closely resembling Donald Trump's at a US airforce base when he stands too close to the helicopter he's just got out of.

Not a good look

It's not a good look. So when I make my appearance on the start line at Blackheath in two week's time, I will be shorn and shaven and looking my best for the big occasion.
Of course, the last couple of weeks before a marathon is not just about tapering and making the last-minute preparations. It's also about carb-loading. The dietary advice seems to be that this is the time when you tilt your diet from being protein-rich to being more carbohydrate heavy. Which is fine by me. Carb-loaded a whole bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk only the other day. Delicious. 

Game of Moans

The other day, a friend of mine was quizzing me about my marathon training. The long runs you have to do each week, she wanted to know - were they painful or boring? Well, naturally, I had to put her straight on that matter right away. You're quite, quite wrong, I told her -  they are both painful AND boring.
Actually, I'll take the boring bit over the painful part any day. I can cope with a bit of boredom. That feeling of  "oh God, if I have to run round this sodding park one more time, past the same sodding trees, and the same sodding lake, and the same sodding teenagers loafing about on the same sodding park bench, my brain will literally implode". There are ways to counteract that - counting off the distance you've covered, for example, or playing complex games in your brain like trying to remember who killed who in Games of Thrones,

Let me think - who did he kill?

or which members of the cabinet haven't yet resigned over Brexit. Basically anything to distract your brain from the tedious task of plodding on for hour after hour.
It's the pain that's harder to take. Sometimes it seems to me that long-distance running is more about pain management than anything else. Or rather, it's about trying to spread the pain equally around your body and stop it overloading just the one part. Last week, the aching was mostly in my calves, the week before it was my hamstrings giving me grief. Now, just for a change, the backs of my knees have decided to get in on the act. I'm expecting my ankles and the balls of my feet to start complaining that they haven't had their fair share of attention soon too. 
One particular little niggle is the ligament at the top of my right hamstring, just underneath my bum cheek. It likes to give me a little tweak every now and then - usually when I'm somewhere in public which makes it difficult and somewhat embarrassing, not to say downright socially unacceptable, to give it a quick massage to make it go away.
Last week's long run (17 miles, at least 4 of them torture) was especially hard on my calves. I had to stop a couple of times to stretch them out, and I even got a spot of what I suspect was cramp in one of them at one point. By the end, it felt like my legs were coming apart or even falling off, as if the nuts and bolts holding them on to my hips had all worked themselves loose. 
Thankfully, I'm friends with a fantastic physio, Isobel Phillips (you really should check her out if you're anywhere near North-east London and, like, your legs are falling off - email her at isobel@abody4life.com), who pretty much put me back together again with a customised therapeutic massage. When you get a really good working over like that, which actively targets whatever muscular problem you're having, you realise the difference it can make.
Keeping my muscles stress and strain free and avoiding any injuries is now becoming a bit of an obsession. One friend of a friend managed to break his leg a fortnight before he was due to run a marathon in Paris, which I suppose is a pretty foolproof way of ducking out of it. But it's not just fractured femurs I'm trying to steer clear of. Knackered knees, aching ankles, twinged toes - I can't afford anything that's going to take away any of the limited training time I have left. I'm even scared of catching a cough or a cold between now and April 28th, just in case that would disable me for a few crucial days. Basically I just want to be wrapped up in cotton wool for the next four weeks and only allowed out for runs and meals.