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.

Somewhere not Palmers Green

There's something to be said for taking a mid-training break somewhere sunny, overseas and near a beach. And that something is "Oh bloody hell, where am I going to be able to run which doesn't involve toiling up a gravity-defying clifftop incline, plodding over strength-sapping sand dunes for miles, or ending up on the barbed-wire strewn building site of a would-be holiday resort apparently abandoned some time in the mid-1980s?"
I'm not a huge fan of trying out experimental new courses for my runs. For me, familiarity breeds content, not contempt. I like to know where I'm going and what horrors lie ahead of me. And while going running while on holiday always seems like a good idea in theory, in practice it usually means getting up at about 6.00 in the morning so you can be finished while the temperature is still in the "stiflingly uncomfortable" range and before it hits the "actually might pass out" level.

Not Palmers Green on a wet Wednesday

This is a long-winded way of saying I spent the last week on Gran Canaria, off the coast of Africa. There are worse places to run, it's true. The broad, flat beach promenades are lovely - and would have been perfect if they could have just joined up without the steep hills in between. And some of the views from the coastal paths were simply stunning - you don't get panoramas like this (see right) when you're plodding round Palmers Green on a wet Wednesday afternoon, I can tell you.
What Palmers Green does have, however, are pavements for running on. Everywhere. No roads where I'm forced to run in the frighteningly narrow gap between the crash barrier and the Canarian car drivers whose haughty disdain for the speed limit would gladden the heart of many a former Top Gear presenter. Or roads where the pedestrian space is effectively a dirt track sporadically riddled with rocks the size of small meteorites. So if my 15-mile long run was about a minute-a-mile slower than it ought to have been (and sadly, it was), I'm blaming the conditions.

Also not Palmers Green

I arrived home from the Canaries to find an email from the charity I'm running for, the MND Association. They contact me every Friday with helpful tips and advice, and rather less helpful recommendations of how far I should have got with my training by this stage. It's very kind of them, though I could probably do without them entitling their emails with the  foreboding "X WEEKS TO GO!" (where x < any number which would represent the lowest amount of weeks in which I might feel ready to run a marathon). Chaps, I know it's only six weeks to go. Reminding me isn't helping.

I'm also getting handy tips from the lovely people at Virgin Money (the backers of the London Marathon), one of which actually made me laugh out loud. This is one of their top ten motivational tips. 

Don't take the "all or nothing" approach, they advise.If you’re short on time, they say, (err, yup) or really not feeling up to a long session (it's like they're reading my mind), just go for a shorter run for however long you feel you can spare (I'm extremely cool with this so far). And then they quote "legendary running author Dr George Sheehan" (nope, never heard of him either, but apparently he was huge in the recreational running world in his day) to ask the apparently rhetorical question “Have you ever felt worse after a run?”

Hahahahahaha. Umm. Guys? Not sure how to break this to you. But yes. Frequently. Usually in a region running anywhere north of my ankles and south of my hips, with particular poignancy in areas such as my lower calves, upper right hamstring and the whole of my groin. 

Don't get me wrong, running has its moments. But right after a gruelling training session when you've expended every last ounce of stamina and effort you have, and your legs are moving with all the gymnastic joie de vivre of an arthritic sloth, is not one of them.

On that note, it's time for my 16-mile long run of the week. I can literally hear the "FIVE WEEKS TO GO" email being prepared, ready to flutter into my inbox on Friday. Can't wait.

My Hero

So I wanted to tell you a bit more about why I'm running the London Marathon, and what (or rather who) I'm running it for. He's a man named Eric Rivers, one of the bravest men I've ever known, who died just over three years ago of the crippling, cruel condition Motor Neurone Disease - a man I'm proud and privileged to have called a friend.

Eric was one of those people who made everyone around him smile and feel better about themselves. A keen and excellent cricketer, he loved nothing more than sport, his friends and - above all - his wife and daughters whom he adored. He was a man who loved life. And then MND came along and took away all of that.
Some of you may remember Eric - he became well-known nationally when he and his family were featured on Nick Knowles' DIY SOS programme. The episode in which Knowles' team rebuilt the Rivers' Enfield home is emotionally wrought even by DIY SOS's standards. But what really came across in the broadcast was Eric's shining intelligence, his quiet courage in the face of adversity, his devotion to his family and above all, his utter humanity. If you can find it on iPlayer, I'd urge you to watch it.
Eric took the fight to the disease which was destroying his body, delaying its progress far longer than the doctors had predicted was possible. By the end, MND had taken everything it could - his mobility, his speech, even his ability to breathe properly. But it could never take his mind or his spirit - he was able to keep communicating via eye movements and a special computer, and even managed to maintain an active social media presence! The wisdom and courage of his writing in his last months will always stay with me.
Eric, and fighting MND, is pretty much the reason I started running in charity events. When I did my first half-marathon for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, Eric and his family were in the crowd, part of the charity's "cheer squad" spurring on their runners at the Royal Parks course. Sometimes when I'm training, and I feel like I'm at my last gasp and I can't go on, I think of Eric and how he'd have coped. And then the rest is easy. Well, easier anyway.
So if you can, please do help me fight back against MND on Eric's behalf. I'll be running the marathon for the MNDA - a fine organisation that finances medical research to combat this incurable monster of a disease, and supports the people and families torn apart by it.  
You can donate via Justgiving by clicking on this link . I'd really like to raise at least £1000 in Eric's memory - that's enough to fund a specialist communication app for eight MND sufferers for a whole year, or pay for a month's worth of laboratory equipment for research into a cure. That's real differences being made to people's lives.
Thanks for reading this far, and putting up me with getting all serious on you. Next time - more mildly amusing stories about the calamities of marathon training. I promise 

PS. You can find out more about MND and the MNDA here mndassociation.org

Trainers and training plans. And velociraptors

It's approaching six weeks since I started this training plan for my first ever marathon and... well, to my surprise, it's going OK so far. I'm steadily increasing my distances - up to 12 miles now (the 11-mile run the week before last was a bit of a disaster, to be honest, but let's put that one behind us). I can run up to 5 miles at tempo, or threshold, pace, which apparently should be slightly faster than the pace you're aiming to race at. And the intervals training, which looked really scary, has not proved a problem either. Yet.
I say yet because tomorrow I'm scheduled to run six half-mile bursts at a pace that equates to about 4.30 mins per km. That's about a minute and a half per km faster than my "race pace". With mere 90 second breaks in between each one. And that's just this week. Next week's intervals training is demanding three mile-long bursts at that speed. Now I know I can do one of those. But three in the same session?? Hmmm.

New shoes

This is one thing I've learned about the Training Plan method. Never, ever look at what the coming weeks have got in store for you. You just panic. It's talking about distances and speeds and sequences that may as well just be fantasy as far as I'm concerned. The only way I've found to cope with this is to concentrate solely on the next upcoming session and think, well, I might be able to do that. And not worry about the rest of the Plan until some time in the distant future. Or next week, as some people call it.
Got a bit of a boost with the training last week - replaced my old trainers with my brand spanking new exactly-the-same-model-as-last-time-just-in-a-different-colour Asics. The main advantages of which are the soles aren't yet worn down and they haven't got a hole in the uppers where my toe has inexplicably poked through. 

Old shoes

I don't know why this happens with my trainers. I don't, as far as I know, run with my toes turned up. My toenails are neatly clipped. One running friend reckons I have feet like a velociraptor (below) - that strange dinosaur with a raised claw that got up to all sorts of mischief in Jurassic Park. Whatever the cause is, I'm hoping this pair can hold out a little longer than the last ones, which developed the extra unscheduled ventilation within about three months. I'd really like the new pair to remain un-holed at least until they've made an appearance at the Virgin Money London Marathon.
Add the new trainers to the pile of extra equipment I've ended up buying to aid my marathon preparations. Got myself a foam roller, new socks, and isotonic jelly beans, investigated those disgusting-looking gels, even browsed through a selection of ergonomic water bottles. But by far my best new acquisition, which I managed to persuade my long-suffering wife to buy me as a birthday present, is my "recovery flipflops".
I'm not gonna lie, they aren't the most beautiful footwear I've ever donned. They look like the sort of thing an overweight German swinger might wear as he waddles his way towards the communal jacuzzi. But looks aren't everything. They are ludicrously comfortable - soft, padded, arched - perfect for pampering your feet after a gruelling double-digit miler. So much so that if it wasn't for the public shame I'd have to endure, I'd happily wear them out of the house. Even to work.
Another part of my marathon preparations is coming together - my fundraising plans. But I'll save that for another time. I have to concentrate now on panicking about my next training session.

I've got a cunning plan...

Or rather, I've downloaded a cunning plan. A plan hopefully even more cunning than Baldrick's one that was as cunning as a fox that has just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford university. It's a plan to get me over the finish line of the London Marathon in four months' time in more or less one piece.
Ever since I excitedly announced I'd got into this year's event, experienced runners have been telling me to get a training plan. "Which plan are you on?" I keep getting asked, or "Have you decided on a plan?". It's almost as if I'm preparing to give birth. Now I'm not much of a believer in rigid training plans, as I know I'm not great at sticking to them. Until now I've managed to get by with a training schedule that is effectively:
Week 1 - a) Run as far as you can, b) Weep, c) Think about giving up
Week 2 - a) Run a bit further than last week, b) Over-estimate the rate of your improvement
And so on and so on.
But this marathon business is a bit more serious it seems. So I've given in and chosen one. It's called Run Less, Run Faster and I have to admit I was particularly attracted by the "Run Less" part of the title. Though it turns out it doesn't involve running any less than I do at the moment, it just means doing it a bit more scientifically.

The 18-week plan, which I really should have begun on Christmas Eve in order to complete it before race day, revolves around three runs a week. The first one involves fairly intense interval training, run at a pace 45 seconds a mile faster than your fastest 10k pace - which for me means about 7.45 mins per mile (which is roughly 5 mins per km, which is OK when you're running minute-long intervals, but is a bit harder for longer periods).
The second is called a "tempo" run, and is apparently the most useful of them all. It starts off with an easy 1 or 2 mile bit, followed by between 2 and 5 miles at "tempo" or "threshold" pace - slightly slower than your fastest 10k pace but faster than normal training pace. For me that entails running for several miles at about 9 minutes per mile (about 5.38 mins per km). 
The third is a long run, starting at 8 miles and working up to 20, at training pace (for me, 9.15 mins per mile, or 5.47 mins per km). Even at that pace, which is comfortable, that's a long hard  3-4 hour slog.
Now all this sounds almost reasonable, at least to start with. But there's a twist. You're also supposed to be doing cross-training workouts on your days off. Days off are when I normally try to recover from the run the day before by hobbling around like a 90-year-old with mobility issues. I think I also saw something about following a proper diet, which is also not going to happen.
Anyway, I've already started, sort of, with an 8-mile run, followed about my first tempo run about a week later. A further attempt at running 9 miles was not a huge success - at the moment, it seems, I'm doing one decent run followed by a bad one. This week, however, we really start in earnest. I'll let you know how it goes