Monday, 22nd March – 34 days to go

Rest Day. When I get up I don’t feel any tightness in the hamstring. Maybe the stretches are beginning to work. I don’t feel like taking a recovery run so I don’t. On checking the results I’m encouraged that Adrian did a 39:32 and Andy Hudson a 39:19 so maybe there’s hope for me that I can break 40 minutes if I can hang onto one of those two at some future race.

Tony is away so I have no gym session today – it really is a day of complete rest and recovery. In order to feel like I’m doing something run related I read Marathon From Start to Finish by Sam Murphy. Someone got this for Liz as a present for her 50th and it seems to have worked as she now says things like “When I run a marathon” before she checks herself to make it sound like she hasn’t actually decided that one day she will. We also have another running book by Sam Murphy and I really like her writing style. On first read she sounds a lot less technical than others, but when you re-read it there’s a lot in there.

When someone has written several books on the same subject it makes me wonder whether they’re just finding a different way of saying the same thing. This book is clearly aimed at the first time marathon runner and as that’s me, it pretty well covers the areas I’m interested in and the concerns I have. Mind, she doesn’t always get to the bottom of things the way I’d like. She says we shrink by 2 centimetres in the course of a marathon run, but doesn’t say why or if/when we get the 2 centimetres back. There are some other pearls such as studies show that if one runs the same distance on soft terrain and on road you’ll burn 26% more calories on the soft terrain, as well as being kinder on the feet. She’s also got a couple of pages on getting round even if your training or the early part of your run has been a disaster. Hope I won’t need it, but commit it to memory anyway. Oh and I’ve got a 1 in 54,000 chance of having a heart attack in the course of a marathon!

A good book. I’d recommend it if like me you won’t do anything without reading a “how to do” book first.