Training advice
Goal races: knowing when to try again? If you miss out on your target time at a goal race, after the disappointment has faded, the next impulse is to find another race to give it another shot. But when and how you should go about trying again is a difficult thing to judge. I had [...]
How do you choose a target time for a race? It's a tricky thing to do. Too ambitious and you set yourself up to crash and burn (and possibly get injured) but too safe and you don't reach your full potential. I had a question about this very subject left on one of my blogs [...]
Last week I had a request to write about strength training. Because we all know that strength training is the way to avoid injury right? Well, not always. I've been doing some strength training twice a week for a while now. I had a break after Edinburgh but built back up again as my miles [...]
Marathon recovery: 10 tips to recovering like a pro Recovery is a subject that doesn't get as much attention as the training and racing, but it's an important one. After Edinburgh 2016, I'd booked a holiday to Mallorca for two weeks, where I like to think I nailed the recovery part of that marathon cycle. [...]
I'll shut up about Edinburgh Marathon soon, but first a post about mental aspect of running a marathon. It's the part that we often don't prepare for as well as we could. That's not to say we don't prepare for it, because every run you do in training involves an element of mental preparation for [...]
Marathon training tips: Winter base training So you want to run a marathon? Maybe your first, maybe your second. Great. Got yourself a training plan? Stuck it to the fridge? Ready to start training for it 16 or 20 weeks out? Great. But your training plan doesn't start for a month or two. What are [...]
I kept fairly quiet about Edinburgh Marathon in the build up to it, so I'm now going to backtrack and do a couple of posts about the preparations that took place. Because, I don't want the silence in the lead up to the race to mislead anyone into thinking I didn't train for it and [...]
The benefits of running slowly After Cambridge Half Marathon I tweeted: "To anyone scared to run slow, I do a lot of my miles at 10:00+ min/mile pace and today ran 7:44/mile for 13.1. Don't be afraid to slow down." While I did a weekly threshold run and some shorter intervals, much of my training [...]
With storms currently playing havoc with my running plans, and another couple of months left before the nights get lighter and the weather starts to improve, I'm sharing a few of my treadmill workouts below that you might like to use to shake up your routine. This blog is sponsored by Hire Fitness UK and [...]
Self assessment: how's your training going? As a coach, it's sometimes expected that I have all the answers. But in reality, often the answers are within the runner themselves, they just need to be asked the right questions at the right time to find them. I'm not observing a runner 24/7 so unless I [...]
