Manchester Marathon Training...

No real need to write a blog note today, but this week I started training for April's Manchester Marathon, and today was the first 'long' run... 😊.  As usual for me, given my fragile post-injury state, I am going to be mainly on the gym treadmill, as was the case today and all the training days so far..  I put the word long in quotes, because an 80 minute run seems long to me, and is the longest of the training plan so far, but I guess for marathon training it's not very long!!!  I started doing the Steve Palladino marathon training plan on Tuesday, and it started with a gentle 35 minutes which was nice.  Then a run on the Wednesday and Thursday was followed by bowling on Friday (which I lost ) and parkrun on Saturday.  So today, Sunday, was the fourth run in the plan and the first reasonably long run.  As always, it's all power and time based rather than raw speed, and today was 10 minutes of low power at the start and end  Then 45 minutes of slightly higher power and 15 minutes of even higher power for the two middle sections.  None of it was very high power and it should have been comfortable but I still found it a challenge!  But it was ok tbh, not that hard.  The average pace at the end of the 80 minutes was 5:15m/km for just over 15km which is kinda decent for me, so I was pleased that it felt quite comfortable.  I hope it remains comfortable as the length of time for the runs increases over the next few months... 🤞.  A quick mention of yesterday's parkrun which was good fun.  I ran down with Mike and met Charlie there,  The weather was lovely and it was a good run, so really I should have been up for a PB.  I did 23:11 which is 44 seconds slower than PB, so not great but not bad 😊!  And only other thing to say is that this my first blog about this marathon training.   It's a 21 week plan, and I have deliberately started it a couple of weeks early as I figured Christmas and New Year may not be full on running weeks!!  Giving it two weeks longer makes sense!  I'll ping a blog about how it's going every month or so, unless something noteworthy happens - which I guess is most likely to be injury.  Anyway, hopefully the whole training plan goes well, and I can do a tad better than this year's 4 hours 40 minutes!!  See what happens 🤞!

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