The London Marathon is just a couple of months away. I’ve had to massively ramp up my training distances this month to catch up with my training plan. Don’t try this at home kids, but going from 78km in January to 170km in February has taken some effort. I’m still only getting 2, and sometimes 3, training runs in every 30 days so it’s meant some much longer runs. I’m just back today from 33km, for instance. In the graph below you can see that I’m about where I need to be; March is going to be a bit tougher though as I have a week out on holiday so need to fit an equivalent distance in a week less.
A key part of my training plan, anyway, was to do far fewer shorter distance training runs and to pack in some long runs whenever possible. The figures below show how I’ve done, in comparison with two marathons in 2006 (the last two I ran). Figures for 2006 are for the whole training period, up to but not including the marathon itself, whereas the 2009 figures are up until today. With two months to go and at least one more than 30km+ run to fit in as well as two formal race half-marathons and a couple of 20km training runs, I’m on track to meet the plan.
I’ve also been pleased this month to beat a couple of long standing records – over 6.25km and 12.25km. I’ll be running the Fleet and Reading Halfs in March and hope to get times of around 1:45 in each of those, although Reading is after my skiing which I’m sure will affect my time somehow.
