Training for the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence Marathon
My friend Martin arrived at the beginning of the week from Graz, Austria for a couple of months. The first night he was here, he placed a book on the kitchen table with the title of “Perfektes Marathon-Training” (Perfect Marathon Training for those of you struggling to understand German) and opened up two pages in the centre of the book - a ten week training programme to run a sub-3 hour marathon. And coincidentally, it is roughly ten weeks until the Self-Transcendence Marathon in August, a marathon I had planned to run without any great expectations of doing well. The possibility of doing sub three hours had never struck me before; I had injured my knee in March, and although I had gotten back to running three or four times a week, my running was more of the ’shake-off-the-lethargy’ variety rather than any serious training. However, the program seems quite reasonable; plenty of recovery running and a good mix of races, long runs and intervals, so we said we’d just start it it and then listen to our bodies as we go along. The last thing any of us want is a return to bad knees.
The great thing is that there are four guys in the house with broadly similar running capacities: Myself and Martin have marathon bests of 3:09 (thats me in the photo) and 3:10 respectively, Matthias has a best of 2:58 (!) and Colm did his best time of 3:21 only a couple of months ago. So we’ve agreed to all be back at the house at 5pm on training days so we can all head off together. I’ve always considered myself a rather solitary runner, but it is great to laugh your way through runs with a bunch of friends rather than shuffle on alone.
The other thing about a training schedule is that it has kind of taken away some of my preformed conceptions about running. I was always one for throwing away the stopwatch and roaming my way through nature; split times and pacing were not for me, thank you. But now I’m actually doing it, I can see the merits of it - you don’t have the luxury of nature to distract you when you’re going around a boring track again and again; you have to turn to the inner landscape and run from the soaring heart instead of the complaining mind.
So let’s just take it day by day; please God I’m not posting a doleful posting next week about injuries and the like…
PS:
If you want your dreams to come true, don’t oversleep. - My brother just read this on his calendar as I was finishing this post; pretty funny.
