Kicked off this year’s marathon training a few weeks back. Same idea (only 3 to 4 runs a week because “life”), but a much shorter cycle of 12 weeks instead of 18. The plan being that I can fit two in this year; I still respect (am scared of) marathons enough that I want to do a full training build up for one; In contrast I have no respect for 20k to 30k which is why I’m dead on my arse at the end of a long run sometimes, oh well.

I want to do training because it forces me to do things I wouldn’t normally do: Namely sprints and tempo runs. And so I hope it will get me fitter (I’m “ok” at plodding on on long runs). But the downside of sprint training is doing it on concrete and it fucks my knees. Made the mistake a couple of weeks ago of doing 800m sprint reps followed by a long run the day after. My knee was already a bit iffy before. On the long run I thought, “it’s ok, this is good practice for running on tired legs”, but I wasn’t running on tired legs I was running on injured legs. Doh.

Has taken me two weeks to recover which is iffy in a short training plan, but I’m going to see if I can pick things up and continue (this weekend on-call isn’t helping though). I’ve gone from “Woe is me, I’ll never run again” to 200m sprints yesterday so I don’t think things were as bad as I thought; Never google symptoms.