Posts Tagged ‘marathon’

Technically, I’ve now run a marathon. I’ve been gradually pushing up the distance on my training runs over August and September, and gone as far as 36 km. But, last weekend, I went for the granddaddy of distances: 42.2 km (26.2 miles).

I took the photo about 13 km into the run. My face didn’t look that happy by the end. And no, I have no idea what was going on with my hair.

I started by going down the towpath of the Aire & Calder navigation. There were rowers practising all along the waterway, right up to whether I turned around somewhere near Rothwell. I then headed home, with a quick stop to pick up a new bidon and more gels, before heading up the Leeds Liverpool Canal towpath in the opposite direction to complete the second half. In the end, I completed 42.4 km.

I did the whole thing in 4:06:25, but I paused for Garmin for the few minutes I was re-supplying in the middle, so my actual time is longer than that. I feel okay having done it. Recently, I’ve been feeling pretty ill at the end of these long runs but I felt good after this one, perhaps because I had drunk a little more than usual. The day after I had a little soreness in my toes and my calves were aching but otherwise, I felt good.

Having reached this milestone, I’m now looking forward to moving my training runs back down to sensible distances.

Last week the Berlin marathon took place and at the event, Eliud Kipchoge smashed the world record. The event got little media courage, which is a shame because it was so no small achievement.

Berlin has been a favourite place to break world records. Since Khalid Khannouchi set a new record in London in 2002, the subsequent seven improvements have all be done in the streets of Berlin. It’s flat and takes place in September so the temperature is usually mild.

Kipchoge set a time of 2:01:39. That’s 1:18 faster than Dennis Kimetto’s 2014 time. To put that in perspective, the last time someone made such a large dent in the existing record was Derek Clayton in 1967.

Kipchoge is the same guy that ran the 2:00:26 in Nike’s #breaking2 event. However, that isn’t considered a world record because of the amount of cheating going on in the race design. This time, however, there is no doubt about the result.

Thanks to C.Suthorn for the photo.

We would like to say a big thank you to James Murray, who ran the Leeds Half Marathon earlier this month, in aid of us. He completed the 21km run in under two hours!