Gary Writes A Blog

42 days left. That’s only 6 weeks until the Marathon.

I haven’t been doing any running since Sunday due to the fact that I had a slight injury in my left ankle. It felt a little like mild “shin splints“.

Anyway, it wasn’t going away and time is running out, so I went for a run this morning around Brunnsviken.

I set my watch to automatically split my time into 1Km laps that can be seen below. I said to myself that I wanted to do the 12Km in under an hour and done it in 59mins 10 seconds.

Because I’m wearing the watch and had set that goal, I ended up running almost exactly 5mins per Km. I’m not sure yet if that is good or bad. Would I have ran faster without the watch telling me how fast to run, or would I have ran slower without it pushing me on?

All I know is I was completely knackered at the end.

A 5 min run through of the cool Garmin connect.

This is the best web application I think I have used to date. It looks great, is easy to use and syncs your devices without any problems. Also has great community features and is best of all free!!!

You can view it below at:
Screencast

I was feeling pretty smug about my 21Km run on wednesday until I spoke to Neil who told me that he had ran 43 MILES yesterday.

OK, I can live with Neil being a better runner than me, but what is not acceptable is him having cooler gadgets than I have. For years he has had a Garmin GPS watch and this is surely the secret of his success.

Now I’ve evened the playing field with one of my own. A Garmin Forerunner 205.

I have to say that this thing is great. It shows the distance you have run, the pace you are running and the time it is taking you.

It has a lot of fun features too, such as allowing you to load it up with different runs and allowing you to set goals and race against virtual competitors, charting your progress on the screen as you run along.

After a run, I always like to plot the route I took on Google maps and see the distance ran etc, and when Neil first got his, I was a little dissapointed with the software that came with it. I think that to get the most out of a tool like this, you have to have better software to analyse the runs you have done.

Thankfully Garmin have launched Garmin Connect, which is a web application that does just that. I’ll post some more about that software later, but basically it syncs to your watch and then overlays your runs on Google Maps and keeps a full diary of your runs etc. It also allows you to see other people’s runs in the area you are interested in and then you can download these runs to your watch and follow their runs and even compete against them virtually.

It also has a handy embeding feature that allows you to embed the runs you have recently done into your blog or facebook page. Here’s a run I did an hour or so ago…

Last night was the first of the TV debates between the three men wanting to be Prime Minister of the UK. Personally, I wouldn’t let any of the three of them look after my goldfish, never-mind the country.

I hate to be pessimistic about the political system, but I’ve got a feeling this clip is more truthful than last nights debate…

The training continues…

On Monday night I went for a 6.8Km run with Maria, where we took a pause half way through and ran quite slowly, but it was a good way to just keep ticking over.

Last night (Wednesday) I decided to push it a little more and did this 21Km run (basically a half marathon)…

Took a long time though. 1:58:34, so I will need to speed up or it will take forever to run this marathon.

Went for a run tonight. Was quite a nice night, the weather was about 9 degrees and it was dry.

I ran around Brunnsviken lake and went past all the places that I have lived while in Sweden. Sounds impressive until you realise that two of the places I lived were only 100m from each other.

Ended up doing 12Km in 70 mins. That’s a bit slow, but at least I done something.

I have been struggling in the mini-league for the last couple of weeks.

A change in management turned around Motherwell’s fortunes this year, so for this weekend I thought I would let Maria do my predictions. OK, so it was 1am and she was sleeping on the couch and I kept asking her what the St Mirren v Hearts score will be, and she doesn’t know what a St Mirren is, but here’s what she came up with…

Saturday, 3 April 2010, kick off 3:00 PM, Fir Park.

Motherwell

v

Falkirk

Saturday, 3 April 2010, kick off 3:00 PM, Ibrox Stadium.

Rangers

v

Hamilton

Saturday, 3 April 2010, kick off 3:00 PM, St Mirren Park.

St Mirren

v

Hearts

Sunday, 4 April 2010, kick off 1:15 PM, Easter Road.

Hibernian

v

Celtic

Extra points – guess First Scorer:

D RiordanPick First Scorer—–No ScorerM BrownD RiordanP CreggC HoggK McCannD McCormackL StevensonM ZemmamaA BenjellounJ RankinC NishG SmithI MurrayA GowY Makabu-MakalambyP HanlonS ThicotS BambaK McBrideG StackD GalbraithA StokesT FlynnD WotherspoonK ByrneA BorucL NaylorM WilsonS BrownA McGeadyL ZaluskaA HinkelP McCourtK MizunoG SamarasG LoovensM CrosasS MaloneyJ ThompsonL N’GuemoM FortuneZ ZhiJ HooiveldT RogneK Sung-YongP SlaneM RasmussenD KamaraE BraafheidR Keane

Sunday, 4 April 2010, kick off 3:30 PM, Rugby Park.

Kilmarnock

v

Aberdeen

Monday, 5 April 2010, kick off 7:30 PM, McDiarmid Park.

St Johnstone

v

Dundee Utd

Wednesday, 7 April 2010, kick off 7:45 PM, Ibrox Stadium.

Rangers

v

Aberdeen

I have just worked out how far a marathon run is. I know it is 26.2 miles, but that is just a number. It only makes sense when you place it onto things you know.

Running a marathon is like running from my home town in Scotland, through West Lothian, into Edinburgh into the city centre, past the castle, down into Leith, out to Portobello and finally into Musselburgh.

Armadale to Musselburgh. That would take 5 or 6 hours hours on a bus.

well, the mental training anyway.

How did I get myself into this mess? Henrik and Celeste decided to call my bluff about running the marathon and got me an entry to this years race as my birthday “present” on my 30th. Thankfully Henrik has to run it too, so I am not alone.

Now with less than 70 days til the race, it’s time to take stock of what lies ahead.

First thing that strikes me is that I do not want a repeat of the Lidingö loppet fiasko. The problem there was that I only did 3 training runs. One was 3.6 Km, one was 7Km one was 17.8Km and then the race was 30Km. I was completely exhausted, to the point of a near death experience, at the end of that race. This race is 50% longer. And I am three years older.

So with this prior warning in mind, what training have I managed to do so far? Well, over the last couple of weeks I have ran from my office to the flat three times. I think that I can do this quite comfortably now.

Problem is that it is only 2.3Km. Being able to run that in 20 minutes is of no benefit. I need to add big numbers to that total.

I am running the Stockholm marathon.

The Stockholm marathon is 70 days from today.

That’s 10 weeks from today.

I am unfit.

I am scared.