I'm now onto day 4 of my training and last night was my second run. The preparation for this one was, in most ways, much better than the first run. My stretching of key areas like my hips, vital due to my spending the better part of 8 hours a day sitting at a desk, and my thighs, which caused a lot of trouble last time when they had started to tighten up quite early on in my first run, was more thorough and it definitely felt a lot better. My preparation did leave a lot to be desired in terms of my choice of running gear however. It seems that shorts are already out. The cold meant that by the time I had hit the 2 km mark I started to notice my calves were beginning to tighten up to a point where it was pretty uncomfortable to keep a slower and more steady pace. Despite this I made fairly OK time over the 5km by completing it in 34 minutes, which is roughly the same time I finished 4.7km on Sunday.
This week is all about the 5km. The training plans I have, recommend being able to run 5km before starting them, something I haven't really attempted before. So far, that's looking pretty good barring any disasters. I've plotted myself a pretty decent 5km route that covers a few different types of areas, there are a few inclines in there that are pretty tough going and the route can be at times, for Whitburn anyway, pretty scenic, especially when it takes me through Polkemmet Country Park. The only problem is that it's pretty much exactly a 5km round trip. This causesd me problems when I decided to end my run at my parents house instead of mines. The last 500m were completed running around the streets surrounding my parents house, constantly checking my run tracker app to see if I was done yet. Definitely an odd experience.
One of the biggest challenges of this whole training period is going to be how I eat. I'm not a particularly big guy around the waist but I could do with shaving off a few pounds even if it is, as has been pointed out, for aerodynamics come marathon day.
It's actually kind of a miracle that I'm not a lot heavier than I am, I am an extremely big eater who does not eat at all right and does very little to counter-balance this unhealthy eating. It's not helped by the fact that in a town of very little else, there is a lot of tremendous food places in Whitburn.
Despite all this my weight has never really fluctuated much, I've gotten bigger as I've gotten older but never to alarming levels. Even internally I'm not doing to badly, my cholesterol is higher than I would like but it isn't classed as high. In a way I'm probably a wonder of science.
Cards on the table though, the word "diet" strikes fear in to my, saturated fat clogged, heart. It means giving up the donner kebab that should accompany the mid-night-out walk between pubs. It means giving up fish suppers (chips aren't always necessary and are often replaced with 6 large fritters). It means no more garage burgers (a culinary invention of my own, it's a microwaveable burger, topped with macaroni cheese, with diced pepperami). It's genuinely one of the worst things I've ever tasted, but it looks magnificent. It means spending 4 hours Googling quinoa, to still not fully understand what it actually is but to come to the conclusion that it's probably healthy so I should probably start eating it, only then to discover that by eating it, you're actually causing the price of it to rise so high that the people who used to eat the stuff can't afford it and are turning to eating, the now cheaper, junk food. Magic.
My creation: the now infamous "Garage Burger"
The hardest part for me though is that it also means giving up pizza. Beautiful, glorious pizza. I can only use one example to describe my love of pizza. I recently bought someone, as a birthday present, a pizza. Like someone might buy a friend an album by some great new band that they just have to hear because, as all great music can, it might just change their life. I bought someone a pizza. I think that fully explains my love of pizza.
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