Edinburgh Marathon: Training with Illness

I am now two months in to my training for Edinburgh Marathon, which is at the end of May this year.

I knew when I signed up for the Edinburgh marathon that training would always be the hardest part. Yes, running over 26 miles isn’t exactly going to be a walk in the park, but weeks and weeks of long runs and short runs and tempo runs and all that jazz? And having to fit all that in around my strength training and taekwon-do and work and kids? Urghhhh.

You can imagine my surprise then, that the biggest impediment to training so far hasn’t been the gym or TKD or even the kids, but maintaining my health long enough to actually fit training in. What with the flu over New Year and two different colds, I feel like I’ve been floored by none other than my own self. It’s especially galling as I don’t generally get ill. Well, not physically anyway.

By this point I should have done several runs around the 19-20km mark, according to my training plan. However, I’ve only gone as far as 17km (twice) and the rest have been shorter runs around 10-12km. I know I can do a half marathon (21km) so I’m not too worried about having not hit that distance, but the run lengths are going to start getting longer soon and I wanted a better base to move on from.

Run length aside, I have made changes to my supplemental/strength training of late too. I was finding Wednesday leg day really impacting upon my Thursday long run, and as such have moved legs to Mondays. It does mean my legs are knackered from Sunday’s long run, so my squat strength is basically zilch, but I keep reminding myself that I can build this back up after the marathon in May. This change worked straight away and I felt more comfortable and had better aerobic endurance for last Thursday’s run.

I’m tired and deflated from all these germs, but I’m positive that I still have time to make up for missed and shortened runs. I have to, because this isn’t just about me.