The Grind

Before you read any further this isn’t a blog post about coffee or coffee making; though with my marathon training reaching peak mileage in March it has certainly felt like I am some sort of coffee bean. Gradually being ground down into some finer form, which will help me achieve a smooth, refreshing run at London. Maybe I should just stop with the metaphors now and continue with March’s entry...

The title from this blog post came about because March has proved to be my most challenging month in terms of trying to achieve my peak marathon training. Moving to Bedford and the weather have proven to be key issues in my training. A particular example being when I moved house, is that it decided to snow quite heavily in Britain, ending up with me bravely blowing up on the treadmill trying to do a tempo session. It was after that tempo session, slipping and sliding on the snow, that I wondered if I had maybe fared better outside than on what I have termed the ‘hamster wheel of doom’ for my indoor running.

Moving to Bedford brought its own challenges. Commuting into London has definitely been a shock to the system; I thought I was quite hardened by travelling on the tube, but it turns out you need a particular type of guile to find a place on an overcrowded train early in the morning. For most of March my heart rate has become erratic, which I put down to my body adjusting to the move and the commuting. My hip flexors and hamstrings have all become significantly tighter; most likely due to sitting down on my 40 – 60 minute commute from Bedford to London. I do not have any evidence for these assertions, but the general fatigue I have felt in early to the middle of March, anecdotally feels like it has come from commuting.

Besides the commuting and the weather, the other major factor that made moving a challenge was finding new running routes. I didn’t realise how much I took running for granted when I was doing my training in London. Admittedly it is an overcrowded city, but as long as you get up early enough there is space and the routes laid out for you to do a whole variety of running. When you move out to a small town it can seem quite daunting to find new running routes, which aren’t along country roads without any pavements or just on bleak pavements running alongside A roads/ dual carriageways.

One way that I was able to find routes for my training was by looking on my local government website for cycling routes. Whilst running along cycle routes does carry its own risks, e.g. getting knocked down by cyclists; what I encountered were beautiful routes that tended to avoid a lot of traffic and showed some very nice parts of Bedford. These routes are definitely less crowded and quieter than what I have found in north London. If anyone ever wants to do some cycling/ running in Bedford then I would definitely recommend looking at this map , as it can provide the basis for any decent running route. If in any doubt, the Embankment in the centre of Bedford offers a nice loop of around one mile. After more research I came across the charity Sustrans, whose aim was to connect more people to each other by walking and running. No doubt there could be a niche for runners (especially for ultra-distance runners) on the national cycle routes, but I suppose that can be debated another day.

March is also that familiar time of year for marathoners of what I have termed the ‘slog’. Where for each of the weeks in March, running starts to become quite tiring as peak mileage approaches. I always find myself on a razor’s edge during this period of training. There is still the desire to keep pushing hard in training; but also the knowledge that if you get too greedy, then it can lead to overtraining or worse injury. I find myself questioning whether training this hard is really a good thing and when the fatigue that sets in, like the last six miles of a marathon, wondering whether all this time and effort is worth it. I suppose it will always depend on how training has gone in January/ February. If it has gone well then maybe there is no pressure, but if there has been illness and/or injury then there is the desire to redouble one’s efforts.

There is no exact science to this, and each marathon cycle has its different challenges as well as ‘rewards’. Maybe that’s why we can all become so addicted to running, as you never know what training cycle is going to come next. What I am certain about is looking forward to putting in those final few key workouts before racing the Sandy 10 in April. I can definitely say that I have enjoyed the process of training for London 2018 and hope that my training will pay off.