Cool Runnings Rambling : Issue 4
My next revelation on my quest to running enlightenment was a fantastic website which would transform my evenings for weeks to come (much to my other half’s annoyance). The website is http://gb.mapometer.com (short for mapping pedometer) where you look at Google Maps, draw lines on them and it tells you how far the line is. This opened up the floodgates to the obsessive compulsive in me and ever since I have been drawing little red lines around Littlehampton, Rustington, Worthing, Staffordshire, Milton Keynes, Bristol and Brighton and anywhere else I might be over the coming six months. The downside to this fab new discovery was the disappointing news that my regular three mile run was actually only two and a half miles which immediately meant that my times were far less impressive than I first thought. D’oh!
Armed with this knowledge and my new fave website I set about planning a variety of runs to cover most of the distances in my training plan and unlike most of my previous attempts at marathon training I even started running some of them, well, the three and four mile ones at least.
And then, disaster! Whilst mucking around with my five year old daughter she managed to accidentally stamp on my foot making me yelp out in pain. I didn’t think much of it at the time but after my next run my foot was really sore. I didn’t run for a couple of days to see if it got better and it did, but the next time I went out I got the same pain again only much, MUCH worse, so bad in fact that I went to A&E to get my foot x-rayed. Thankfully it turned out not to be broken but I had damaged a ligament and bruised a bone and was told in no uncertain terms that if I continued to run that it would only get worse. The best guess of the doctor was that eight weeks should do it.
The drive home from hospital was horrible. Eight weeks without training! I thought back to prerequisites of my novice marathon runner’s training plan:
1) You have been running regularly for at least a year
2) You can run at least 5 miles comfortably in one go
3) You are averaging 20 miles per week or more in training
4) You are not suffering from a chronic or recurring injury problem
Whilst the first was obviously never achievable I had already ticked off number 2 and was only about five miles short of being able to say yes to number 3. Now here I was unable to train and with the very worrying prospect of being the victim of number 4.
The length of the training plan was 23 weeks and the eight week lay off the doctor ordered took me right up to the start of the 23 week plan. I now had eight weeks of rest in which to save my marathon dream.
