The Plan of Attack!

After an enforced week off, partly spent in a remote West African desert city, I have come up with a plan of attack for Dublin. I am not usually one to establish a training programme for a particular event; I run because I like it. However I have always had a vague mental plan of approximately how far I should be running. Now it is a vague written plan instead.

In my rowing days, we used a ‘2 week cycle.’ The start of the cycle was a row on the Monday after a weekend event. For the first week of the cycle, we would row long and hard – a particular ‘favourite’ of the coach was 10 x 500m sprints, only stopping for long enough to turn the boat round in between each one, to build speed.

The second week was a taper – rows would be long, but with less speed work, and getting shorter towards the end of the week. We usually had the Friday off and raced on Saturday.

So in contrast to previous marathon campaigns, I will try an approximately 2 week cycle approach. I have also entered a few races over the next 5 months as follows:

June 12^th – Christianshavnermilen (7.5km)

June 18th – Brolobet – across the bridge to Sweden (21.1km)

July 3^rd - Christianshavnermilen (7.5km)

August 28^th – DHL Statfeten (5 x 5km relay)

October 1^st – Powerade half marathon (21.1 km)

October 30^th – Dublin Marathon (42.2km)

I will take another week ‘off’ running now to ensure a proper recovery, and then start a moderate 2 week cycle with the Brolobet as the end point. The aim there will be merely to finish within the spread of my previous half marathons (1 hr 24 min – 1 hr 29 min).

We then enter the 2 week cycles. July’s ‘Christianshavnermilen’ is at the end of the second.

3rd – 15^th July – 3^rd cycle

16^th – 22^nd July – ‘half cycle’

23^rd – 31^st July – off on holiday!

1^st – 13^th August – 4^th cycle

14^th – 27^th August – 5^th cycle

28^th August – 8^th September – 6^th cycle (incorporating the DHL relay)

9^th September – 12^th September - off

13^th September – 30^th September – 7^th (long) cycle - Powerade half marathon at the end. Aim to beat half marathon record of 1 hr 24 min 27 sec.

1^st October – 15^th October – 8^th cycle

16^th October – 30^nd October – 9^th cycle – though tapering throughout.

I am not putting specific km – targets onto the cycles as there is no telling how each one will actually pan out with other non-running activities. However the overall aims are to keep steady – say around 30km per week, up to the holiday week at the end of July, then build up thereafter. In the 7^th cycle – slightly longer than 2 weeks to bring the dates into line – I would expect to be running 70 – 80km per week.

Copenhagen Marathon 2006

Slightly hungover after last night's inevitable excesses, I walked down to the lakes to watch part of the race. Here are the 3 hour pace setters at the corner of the Sortedams Sø at KM33 - there, but for the grace of God, go I...

From a purely casual viewpoint, and of course not being a position to have to prove it today, that pace looks achievable.






And here to the right is the 3.15 pace setter rounding the north east corner of 'my' lakes. Always nice to run a race on home ground. A year ago, I was about 1.5 - 2 minutes ahead of him at this point.

Roll on Dublin!

What is this all about?

In 2005, I ran my 4^th marathon – in my newly-adopted home city of Copenhagen. The day started cool, but the rain stopped as the run started and by the end the skies were clear. I finished in a respectable 3 hours 13 minutes, my fastest marathon time to date. The run was comfortable – 1 hour 37 for the first half, 1 hour 36 for the second half – and I spent the afternoon recovering with a couple of beers and a light lunch with my parents in the sun down the road at Nyhavn.

I had never been better prepared for a marathon – over the preceeding 3 1/2 months, I had run 417km without a hitch. This was clearly the way forward, and that elusive sub-3 hour time I have always had my eye on was within reach. In 1995, my last year at school, a friend of mine and I had toyed with the idea of entering the London marathon and to aim for 3 hours. I however, aged 17, would have been a month too young, and erred on the side of caution when it came to deciding whether or not to lie about my age on the form. What if they checked up?

I finally got round to my first marathon in 1998 in Beijing. I was a student, out drinking cheap Yanjing beer in a bar in Sanlitun. My room-mate saw a flyer pinned to the notice board, advertising the marathon in 4 weeks’ time. I filled in my details and left the card in the box. My room-mate wasn’t drunk enough to do the same.

4 weeks later, I had been for 15 training runs and lined up on the start line in Tiananmen Square. 3 hours and 26 minutes later I finished – and after minimal training, had set a personal best that was to stand for 7 years.

It was not as though I became a regular marathon runner though. I ran in Paris in 2000, achieving a time of 3 hours 34 minutes despite have trained somewhat more than prior to Beijing. I then had a series of jobs in odd places around the world and, although I carried on running, didn’t compete in another marathon until Berlin in 2004. This took 3 hours 41 minutes. My times were going the wrong way!

9 months later however, I finally got a good marathon under my belt in Copenhagen. That same afternoon, sitting in the sun at Nyhavn, I decided to keep running at a lower rate over the summer, build up from early 2006, and get below 3 hours one year hence.

One year hence, I am sitting on my sofa with an injured leg and no chance of running tomorrow. Since February I have run 466km, though February and March only accounted for 100km of this. Maybe I wouldn’t have broken 3 hours tomorrow, but was certainly in with a chance of beating 3.13. My test run this afternoon revealed that I had not recovered from my injury incurred last weekend on my second-last scheduled practice run. I went home, booked myself a place on the Dublin Marathon at the end of October and did what any other man in Copenhagen in a similar situation would do. Called a few friends and arranged to go out for beers this evening.

This blog will be about my training for Dublin…and we will see if this time next year that 3 hour barrier is still standing.

The start

Left: How it should be.



Copenhagen marathon is tomorrow. I however will not be participating, having injured my left calf last Sunday. A test run this afternoon proved it is still injured, so I will sit on the sidelines.





Below is a pic of my leg and the invisible injury. No swelling, no marks, nothing to show that it is hurt in any way at all. If anybody knows how I did it - and how I can stop it happening again - let me know.



It has happened before - while out running, without warning, it feels as though I have been shot in the calf. Not that I would know how this feels of course - just a stabbing pain that within a couple of strides forces the runner to stop. And it takes 3 - 4 weeks before you can run again.