LONDON MARATHON 1

11 Oct 09

So I finally strapped on my new trainers and started the regime yesterday. Having been awoken by the kids at 6 and been joined downstairs by one of our weekend guests, I decided that this was the perfect time to leap into action.

Fully tooled up with new shoes, the Nike + and an iPod full of great music (that my older children consider Classical - ELO, Genesis, Led Zeppelin), I launched myself out of the gate into an unsuspecting, ignorant and still unimpressed, world.

Out of our gate, you have 4 options (or 5 if turning right round and going back to bed counts). 2 are up significant hills, one is a dirt track, and the fourth is very scenic until it too presents an incline that you would rather descend.

Having taken the fourth option, crossed the River Wey and run past the Green, the Pub, and the river again listening to Ride of the Valkyries, I soon relaised that I was going far too fast, am very unfit (last running because some hairy Chief Petty Officer (Physical Training) was threatening to assault my person should I not show a clean pair of heals some good few years ago), and was listening to the wrong music! Technology and I had proven a lack of familiarity with one another, and my workout mix had not started and nor, to my chagrin after my olympic first half mile, had my workout.

From then on it was all down hill in everything but reality. I revisited the reason for my consistent losses in the school sack race at the age of 7 - doing the first 2/3s of the course at astounding speed and leaving everybody else sucking up my dust and then thrashing around on the ground trying to gasp the oxygen my body needed to stay alive as everybody else came bouncing gleefully past - and realised that I was again going too fast.

You don't think that you need lessons in how to run; surely it's just one foot in front of the other at a speed that you feel is acceptable to describe as running without being a sprint. But oh no! It is a science, and more important than schoolboy biology, physics or chemistry, because while I am not aware of having used any of these three, the science of running is going to become vital to understand if there is any hope of becoming the Ironman I envisage myself as at the end of my training and on the start line of the Marathon alongside the other elite athletes.

It is all about regulation and pace and rhythm and discipline and concentration, all of which have never really worried me before, but a bedtime read of my London Marathon magazine last night suddenly clarified for me. And since I covered the 2.5 miles in less time than it has taken me to write this first entry, I now prove my lack of understanding of these key issues.

2.5 miles in a little over 25 minutes, giving me a per mile pace of 10.something minutes, and therefore a sub 5 hour marathon, was very pleasing, particularly because of the aforementioned Everest half way round, which an aggressive walking pace dispatched while proving that I had hamstrings and calf muscles and poor lung capacity.

Today I daren't sit down for too long as these and other long-forgotten muscles are shaken out of their headlong plunge into retirement, and my walk to and fro the office - 0.92 miles as Nike + tells me - is the best I can manage until the pain eases off and I feel it is once again safe and wise to do my Forrest Gump on the next unsuspecting option.