Monday, 1st March – 55 days to go

Blimey, it’s March already. That marathon date is looming larger. Today is a rest day before tackling a long run tomorrow – “2 hrs 40 min easy”. The weather has bucked up, wintry sunshine and plenty of activity in the rookery opposite our house. Can I see these as signs of Spring?

We have an hour at Tony’s in the evening. After warming up I’m straight on Tony’s folding table for a massage. Level 1 again today – there are no niggles just an underlying heaviness in the legs. Liz concentrates on exercising her dodgy shoulder while I just lie there and do bugger all. Afterwards the legs feel considerably lighter; not exactly pumped full of helium but no longer full of lead.

I’ve been pondering over what time I ought to be aiming to run the VLM. Indeed, I’ve been considering whether it would be better to not set a target and aim to get round reasonably slowly and just enjoy the experience. I know from Marathon Talk that there is some fairly detailed splits information available on each London Marathon finisher from previous years. I download information about 3:15 finishers and 3:30 finishers in 2009 and stick it into Excel. First interesting thing; the splits are at the 5k marks throughout the race plus the half way mark. Clearly there are mats to run across each 5k that recognise your chip, I’d imagined that all markers would be mile markers with no reference to kilometres. Only two out of the thirty runners recorded negative splits. Times for almost everyone fell away significantly for the last 12k. The 3:15 runners ran more closely to a 3:15 pace than the 3:30 runners did to a 3:30 pace so I guess consistency pays off.

I don’t have to commit to a target until the day of the race, but I’d feel more comfortable with a defined target so I don’t go off too fast and can aim to maintain a steady pace. It sounds daft but a kilometre target of 4:39 seems less daunting than a mile target of 7:27. I think I’ll stick with 3:15 as a notional target for now and then just see how the training goes.