Leicester Marathon 2018

Ok, so I'm not going to make any excuses for my stupidity on this one... 2 nights before the big race we (at work) released a product we'd been working towards for some months, my day started nice and early (in the office for 6am) and ended in various pubs and clubs - when the company you work for puts a nice ~£1000 tab behind the bar and you demolish it in the space of 6 hours you know it's going to be messy.

Anyway, I wasn't hungover the next day, but my legs did ache from the hours of dancing, my head was foggy, my sleep pattern was destroyed and basically it was never going to do me any favours.

C'est la vie.




So anyway on to race day - it was horrendous weather, like lets-build-an-ark style weather. The roads were flooded (it's surprisingly hard to run through ankle deep water), it was cold (I lost all feeling in my fingers within minutes of running). On the plus side it wasn't overly windy unlike previous years.

Small victories I guess!

All I'm going to say is, the winning time was 2:37:11, which will give you an idea of how brutal the weather was.

Anyway, on to the race itself: I rocked up later than I'd hoped, eventually found parking a distance away, jogged on to the start in the rain without so much as a waterproof (as I wasn't sure if family would make it to the start line in time), struggled to get a toilet stop before the start. Standard race day stuff.

3 - 2 - 1 - GO!

Felt like I was going well for 5-6 miles, but then it started to come down around me; still feeling rough and lethargic from the night out, wet, cold and not in the right mindset to suffer to my limits for another 2 hours I decided to just 'take it easy' for the remainder of the run.

Overall I came in 28th setting a time of 3:09:46 - not too shabby all things considered.

I did learn a lot on this race though:

What went wrong:

• Not recovered from Ironman
• Avoid falling into the usual pitfall of 'oh my God I'm going to lose all this fitness if I don't get out and train hard' and just recover properly.
• 'Hungover'
• Simple really - don't drink, especially that close to a bit race!
• Raynauds hit hard making taking on fluids/food challenging
• If I ever figure out a way of stopping this I'll be ecstatic! I guess just try and figure out a way of surviving when it hits like this.

What went well:

• Once I'd accepted that it wasn't going to be a 'great' run and that I wasn't in the headspace to suffer a sub 3 hour pace I found the run reasonably enjoyable.
• Still posted a good time despite the 'hangover', tired legs, cold and general lack of energy on the day.
• Focus on this in future races - even my 'bad' races are good by most peoples standards.