Woken at 4am, angry and stumbling, I managed to grab the Sennheiser mic and handheld recorder and immortalised the song of this soon-to-be-ex Song Thrush (Turdus philomelos). I am now surfing for an air rifle. Do people still surf the web, or is that expression now antique?
Well, the time has now come to reveal the secret plan that’s been brewing for some time in my head, and F’s head.
Burn To Run
A relay race of 180 miles from Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham down the Grand Union Canal to Limhouse, followed immediately by a run in that little local race, the London Marathon, otherwise known as VLM.
We hope up to twenty runners will take part in this, running legs of up to 20 miles along the route over the three days until I start running at VLM on Sunday morning at 9am.
Read all the details, and follow the runners’ progress on our blog, via Twitter @burn2run, and soon, the inevitable Facebook page.
We’re only just getting started with the publicity, but you can already donate money via our Just Giving page.
Meanwhile, marathon training is going very well. I’m up to the magic 20 miles in my long weekly long run, and topping 40 miles total per week again, whilst keeping up the biking (70 miles last week). I’m targetting 3:05 as Plan A, with 2:59 as a Plan B if my spring race/s go well. I missed out on a place at the Brighton Half, which is now swarming with runners preparing for the new Brighton Marathon, so I don’t really have a target lined up until VLM itself. I am already nervous, oh dear.
Oh, yes, I completely failed to mention that I was extremely chuffed with a PB in the Andy Reading 10k back in December – 37:47. In terms of training for it, my mileage was very low, the long run short, but I did run round the track once a week pretty intensely.
E
quipped with stability-enhancing RUD Bergsteiger shoe snow chains on my Innov8 shoes, I set out for a 7 am Christmas run, with the aim of re-building my collection of running audio tracks. I recently discovered that I had lost my entire year’s worth of recorded runs, previously used for the video RUN. The backup drive had packed up, and I was being asked £500 to restore the data. I decided it wasn’t worth it, and I should just get back out there and get recording a new set for 2011. Once I’ve invested in the DPA omni mics, this should be an ever more exciting exercise, as I can continue to enticingly dangle the Sony stereo mic between my legs to capture the sound of my feet on various surfaces, but also wear the DPAs on my head/glasses/hat to catch the general ambience.
Here’s a six minute extract of the resulting audio – skip to the quiet section with church bells and birds at if you get bored of the sound of my footsteps (how could you possibly?!).
Run – December 25th 2010 by lunaman
The day before I ran along most of the disused train route through the Parc, a beautiful quiet snowy route which I’ve run before, stretching from Beaulieu to Stokel. The ten miles took 1:45, including a ten minute stop to help push a car up a slope where it proceeded to get completely stuck in the ice, and a quick stop to tell a schoolboy that he shouldn’t worry about rushing as it was only 7:15am. Of course my watch was telling the time in England, so no wonder he gave me a funny look. I think I also told him it was ‘sept heures et quatre’. So that’ll really confuse him! I think whatever French I once knew has now moved to the overcrowded section in my brain of forgotten things.
Apologies again for the long delay here. There are big running plans afoot for 2011, not all of which involve me for once, so expect an update here in the New Year when I’ve finished the increasingly painful process of putting several words together to make sense.
I love Brussels – it’s a nice city with a great marathon. This blog is all about the Brussels marathon on the 10th of the 10th 2010.
The Town Hall, Grand Place - not a bad place to finish
The training:
I had an injury layoff in the summer, caused by rolling my foot around on a tennis ball – don’t try it at home except under supervision. So I followed a composite Furman/RW schedule, based around gradually increasing mileage, but never topping 42 miles in a week (so extremely low in sub 3:15 terms) with five 20 milers. I didn’t follow the faster Furman paces this time round, due to the injury, so long runs were traditionally slow, and I threw in slower intervals and HM paced tempo runs. The rest of a typical week was spent cycling, and I certainly did a bit of that. See my previous post for a fuller breakdown of training.
As a rough comparative guide, for Stratford marathon (3:11:43) I biked about 26 hours in the 3 months preceding.
For Brussels I biked for 67 hours, averaging 300 miles a month. Running mileage was about the same, and it was all slower this time round. So… you might think, wtf! What kind of wierd marathon training is this?
At Stratford I had set off for a 3:04 ish marathon time and suffered badly at 20 miles, struggling through to a small PB. This time I just wanted to consolidate my endurance, forget the speed, nurse the injury (so still light on impact / running mileage), and not crash at 20 miles.
The plan:
Steady 4:30 all the way, or as steady as the hilly course would allow, to a 3:09 marathon – a nice PB and enough to establish that my endurance was up to the task.
A quick mention of the happy Bedford Harriers who I chatted to at the start, and spotted irregularly throughout the race. Hey there!
The result:
—-Time — Split — HR avg — notes
====================
1m….. 6:48 — 6:48 — 141
2m…. 13:41 — 6:53 — 154
3m…. 20:37 — 6:56 — 162
4m…. 27:10 — 6:33 — 163
5m…. 34:03 — 6:53 — 161 — uphill
6m…. 40:48 — 6:45 — 160
10k: 44:01 = 4:24 per km / 7:05
This pace was really not intended. I wanted to negative split, feel comfortable in the first half and then push on. But, I panicked when overtaken by the 3:15 pacers, who were way way off target and at one point only a minute or two behind the sub 3 pacing group. Idiots! I didn’t trust my garmin average splits, which were reading 4:17 at 8k, I didn’t run my own race. It was only after the 10k mark when chatting to some other runners that we agreed the pacers were mad and we should all just slow down in a mass protest.
7m…. 47:40 — 6:52 — 158
8m…. 54:30 — 6:50 — 157
9m.. 1:01:43 — 7:13 — 154 — I think my pee stop was here, and the 3:15 pacers overtook once more
10m 1:08:50 — 7:07 — 153 — down, but slowing as chatting to some great Dutch guys
11m 1:15:50 — 7:00 — 153 — down and stomach problems emerge
12m 1:23:10 — 7:20 — 153
13m 1:30:56 — 7:46 — 156 — steep uphill
14m 1:39:59 — 9:03 — 148 — uphill + 2 minute loo break in the woods 
Half Marathon: 1:36:15 = 4:33 / 7:20
Yes, well, what can I say! Here’s your reason for the blog title. During the downhill section my stomach was obviously being jolted around a bit, and perhaps because of the faster-than-planned initial 10k too. I suddenly realised I needed to find a portaloo and quickly! No marshalls could help me out, so I started scanning for trees, and had to let my new Dutch friends run on without me. It took a mile or two until I found a quiet spot, and I overcame my embarrasment only to watch as a tram came within feet of me full of spectators 
15m 1:47:18 — 7:19 — 148 — feeling oh so much better now!
16m 1:54:20 — 7:02 — 153 — downhill
17m 2:01:25 — 7:05 — 152 — downhill
18m 2:08:24 — 6:59 — 155
19m 2:15:57 — 7:33 — 154 — uphill
20m 2:23:49 — 7:52 — 154 — uphill
21m 2:31:03 — 7:14 — 154 — caught up with one of the Dutch dudes finally, who was fading
22m 2:37:55 — 6:52 — 154 — downhill, met up with the Half Marathoners somewhere round here
23m 2:45:07 — 7:12 — 153
24m 2:52:45 — 7:38 — 156 — uphill
25m 2:59:52 — 7:07 — 155
26m 3:07:00 — 7:08 — 154
=====
3:11:16 — argh, no red carpet this year, just cobbles, horrible cobbles, ugh!
=====
Here’s a link to the course profile to give you an indication of the major climbs.
Post-race analysis:
So the good news – no quad seizure at 20 miles, hurrah! The gremlins of both Antwerp and Stratford left behind at last. I felt strong and focused through to about 39k then hung on to the end. Overtaking people felt good, although it was hard to deliberately catch people after the Halfers joined us, as you couldn’t tell who was who from behind, so chasing much fresher half marathoners looking to get their 1:40 wasn’t so easy.
Race review:
I still really like the Brussels marathon. There’s variety, it’s a small field, but you meet up with the very popular Half marathon at about 34k which gives you an extra spur to overtake and more crowd support. I can handle the undulations, there’s hardly a single flat stretch anywhere, and where there is, they throw in a few underpasses. There are water and energy drink stations every 2 or 3 km, incredibly, along with bananas. The km markers were clear, though I think a bit uneven – some manual splits were way off, but of course the average worked out ok. The Grand Place is a wonderful place to finish too, although it was a lot better with a carpet two years ago, harumph!
Conclusions:
I’m very happy, despite the miniscule PB. I’m pretty sure I was a dead cert for 3:09, the loo break took two minutes according to the garmin, so that makes me a 3:09! On the back of a weak summer, lots of biking and none of the Furman pacing, I still managed to PB and to feel strong. This gives me a lot of hope for a future campaign.
Lessons learned (is that any different from conclusions?)
What’s next?
Snowdonia is in three weeks, and I’m still undecided about that, more because I don’t have any company lined up, and I want it to be a fun marathon. The next big target is VLM if they ever send me my GFA place details, and that should still be a sub 3 attempt. I will be trying to up the mileage, shock horror! If, however, my little body complains again about that, it’ll be back to Furman with sharper paces. I’m not so keen on Furman over the winter, because I think my improvement is down to the extra biking, and I’m a fair weather cyclist for sure. So if the body’s up to it, it’s back to 5x a week running over the winter- time to rejoin the herd!
Last words
Nice toilet – great marathon!
After a shocking gap in my reports, I’m finally here with some updates. Below is a quick write up of a summer bike trip to Petworth and back, and still to come is a Highland biking / running / walking post.
First things first – I will be running in the Brussels marathon in three weeks time, hurrah!
The early summer foot problem has been resolved, no more tennis-ball-standing tricks for me. Gradually the running mileage has crept back up to 40 miles a week, and I’ve now run five 20 milers (including one 23 miler), the accepted standard for a decent marathon training campaign.
I’ve drawn up a couple of charts that compare the three months prior to the Stratford marathon at the end of April, to the last three months before Brussels.
The charts show, pretty clearly, that although my running mileage hasn’t increased much, I’ve been doing a lot more biking, and therefore total exercise. What difference all this will make only time will tell.
Shockingly I haven’t been following a specific plan, but have thrown in tempo runs, long runs, and some intervals or speed work. If you remember, I followed a Furman Institute plan for the spring marathon, and felt that I was a bit let down because I didn’t cross train hard enough. That’s been fixed, although I haven’t followed the Furman faster-paces plan this time. Long runs have been run at a relatively easy pace of Marathon Pace (MP) + 60 seconds or so, compared with the final long run of the spring campaign which was 20 miles at MP + 15 seconds.
So I feel confident that I can approach my PB in Brussels, as the long runs have felt easier and easier, and I ran a local 10k recently run in 38:50 after biking 15 miles to get to the race. By comparison, my previous PB of 37:55 was run after two months of targetted 10k training. Perhaps all the summer biking has been of real benefit?
The plan then is to set off at 7:15 minute miling, or a nice round 4:30 minutes per kilometre, since this is a race run in a metric country. If I can keep this up, it’ll fetch me a brand new PB of 3:10, creeping ever closer to life-changing sub 3 status! It would be nice to run a consistently paced race this time, after the Stratford experience of 20 miles at 7:05 followed by a slowdown to over 8 minute miling.
The next target is London 2011, which I’ll run to raise money for the Burns Unit at University Hospital Birmingham, where F was treated in 2003.
Photos and a Highland report to follow!
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