Ok, so I admit, today’s blog entry is a bit off the wall, but for anyone struggling to lose weight this might just give you that extra bit of motivation.

I was sitting in the Jacuzzi today after running, complaining to my wife that I cannot shift the last 4kg I need to get down to London Marathon race weight.

Last year when I started training again I was around 70Kg this soon dropped to 66kg with very little effort and after a couple of 100 mile weeks in Lanzarote over the Christmas holidays it dropped to 64kg, It appeared I was well on target to my London Marathon race weight of 60kg, and feeling very good about it too.

Since December, I have not dropped any weight at all! I have had my body fat assessed and am still around 13%. Don’t get me wrong, this is actually a very healthy figure, probably ideal from a health perspective, but for the London Marathon I need the highest power to weight ratio I can manage. If I drop 4kg of fat, then the percentage of my body fat will drop to around 7%. I do not want to lose any muscle mass, as this is useful weight, it would be like making a car engine smaller, it would make the car lighter, but also less powerful. Taking out the rear seats and removing the spare tire on the other hand would lighten the car, while maintaining its power, so that it could effectively go faster.

Back to humans, 7% body fat is very low and I would not recommend anyone keeping such a low figure for extended periods of time. Women should try and hold 12% as an absolute minimum, although many elite female athletes do go lower. The principle is the same whether you are an elite athlete or just wanting to improve. Excess body fat will slow you down on the run.

Looking at this weight issue a little more scientifically, I can recall that at my peak, while running on a treadmill at race pace, my maximum oxygen consumption was measured at just over 5000 litres of oxygen consumed per min. Again, using the analogy of an automobile, If this was bus, with a 5 litre engine it would not be very powerful at all, due the overall weight. A mini car on the other hand with a 5 litre engine, would have the potential to be a very fast and powerful racing machine.

In order that we can compare big people against smaller people this maximum oxygen consumption figure is usually expressed as a ratio of body weight. At 60kg, the maximum volume of oxygen I can consume per kg of body weight per minute is 83 litres. You may have seen this figure called Vo2max. Thus we can say that at 60kg my Vo2max is 83. At 64kg my Vo2max is only 78. Or put another way, this is equivalent to a 6% reduction in the capacity of my engine.

With age it is suggested that you lose about 1% of your Vo2max per year after the age of 30. I am 46, so that if I can lose the 4kg in weight and get down to my target 60kg on race day then I will have effectively turned the clock back 6 years! For anyone who is not an older athlete but is slightly overweight, you will boost your power to weight ratio and thus run much faster if you can lose a few spare pounds of fat. However you look at it, weight loss will help me run faster on race day, so I must think twice before eating. Am I eating because I need energy, or am I just being greedy?

Next time we’ll look at what you can and should eat in the run-up to a race.

Let me ask you a question – what is an easy way to stop over training and prevent illness, injury and underperforming? Answer…quality of sleep!

As the London Marathon approaches, all the training starts to take its toll. For me I notice it as little niggles and injuries. I am constantly tired, trying to juggle work and family life with the training. Massages, 2XU compression clothing, supplements etc. can only do so much to help the recovery process. There is no substitute for a good night sleep.

On Wednesday after a full day’s work I had to run 10 miles on the track in under 54mins! This was no problem on Wednesday evening but I struggled to get out of bed on Thursday morning.

Luckily I have a little technique I starting using with the Olympic triathletes I used to coach in Japan. They could be doing up to 30 hours training a week and over training was a serious likelihood. However before the body becomes over trained and gets sick or injured, your sleep patterns become disturbed. This usually happens about two weeks before any problems appear in your daily life or training. Hence it is often OK to train really hard for one week, the body can take the overload, so long as you allow recovery afterwards.

If you don’t take time off after a block of hard training your nervous system gets out of whack and you will start to break down. If kept unchecked over a long period of time, not only will it destroy your training and racing times, but you will probably get sick often and most likely injured, but you could even run the risk of getting ME.

So now I have scared you all, what do we do the prevent it? I use what is called a Quality of Sleep Index. QSI It is very simple to employ. When you wake up on a morning before getting out of bed, just note down your resting pulse and grade your sleep on a scale from 1-7. If it was the best night’s sleep ever and you feel like taking on the world give yourself a 1. If you feel as though you have just been run down by a double decker bus, and had the worst night ever then you need a 7.

Often in the early days of over training you feel really bad at night, sleepless, restless, hot and sweaty, but after waking up and having a coffee you feel OK and soon forget the night and dismiss it as a bad dream.

IT IS NOT…it is the early warning system telling you to ease up, and it must be listened to.

I usually grade myself a 4 when I have a typical night’s sleep, at the weekend with an extra lie in bed after an easy day’s training I may get a 3 or once in a while after an easy week I get a 2. After last Wednesday’s track session I struggled and had a restless night. Thursday morning was definite a 5. If these 5’s continue over a week or so I take extra rest days. One or two after hard training are to be expected. A 6 or 7 is an immediate rest day.

Your resting pulse is also another guide to help. If it raises by more than 10% then you are over trained and should consider a rest day or a very easy day’s training.

I slept well last night and gave myself a 4 this morning, my pulse was its’ usual unbelievably low 29. I also take my blood pressure which was 117/63 so all in all an average morning for me. The fact that I am writing this in bed instead of doing my morning run is down to laziness not tiredness today. But at least I know the difference.

I shall just have to get out in my lunch break for my easy run.

1-month and 22-days until the London Marathon.

Back in the UK and today is raining again!

After the fun at The Okinawa marathon, the build up, the actual marathon and the buzz of a great night out to celebrate, I started to get sluggish the day after. I had planned an easy week to cope with muscles soreness, but to be honest I didn’t get any.

DOMS (aka: delayed onset of muscle soreness). This is something that affects us as we get older. My kids are teenagers and don’t know what sore muscles are yet. At 20, I was sore for a day then got over it, at 30 it took 2 days. By 40 it took 2 days even before my legs got sore!

Now I just accept that I will get sore muscles a few days after an event as my recovery slows down, but this time I kept waiting and nothing happened, so that was the good news, however, although no sore muscles, I have been jaded all week and it wasn’t until now that I felt ready to go again with my training for the London Marathon. I was not expecting this. Luckily I planned an easy week to help me recover and this is something I would suggest everyone does after a marathon.

I will settle back down into training again, but on yesterday’s run I noticed that my left knee was aching, it is nothing serious, but how often have you gone for a jog and thought, that it’s not quite right, but kept on running. The next day you think the same, but there is a bit more of a twinge, but still not quite enough to stop you running. After a while it progresses to a dull ache…and finally a real pain in the knee which is unbearable! Only then do you think maybe I should see someone about it, and possibly rest up!

As runners we get addicted to running and cannot bear to miss a day’s training…Is this you? If so change your ways as it will ultimately be your downfall!

I am now pro-active and just in case this gets worse I am cutting back my running to only 4 days a week. This may seem drastic as I am not officially injured yet, but just in case I will introduce some swimming and the cross trainer to let the joint recover from all the impact training. I am also stretching more than before and icing it 3 times a day, not to mention consulting with Alex Drummond from the Drummond Clinic, and getting some good ultra sound. This may seem OTT for something which is not yet an injury, but I have learnt the hard way, be warned and be cautious. The last time my left knee hurt, and I didn’t act fast enough, it took 2 years to get over it.

I intend to keep the quality in my running as I train for the London Marathon. This is the important stuff, all I am dropping is the junk miles those easy runs that we all love to do because they are easy and fun, but really will not help our running economy. A general tip is that it usually takes about 36 hours to recover between runs, but unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day! By cutting back to 4 runs a week, I will extend the recovery time and this should allow me to keep training and ward off an injury…and so with this in mind, I am off to the pool for an easy swim today.

So how did I get to start off this blog injured ? Well actually it was bad luck and not over training although I was training very hard at the time. I went to Lanzarote with my family and work college Mike Martin. Mike and I intended to do some serious running in between entertaining the kids.

The aim was to get in some distance running in my preparation for the London Marathon next April. After doing my strength and conditioning training from September to December, it was time to change the programme and do the distance phase of my training. I had planned 10 weeks of longer slower running at around 80 miles a week, with two weeks over the Xmas break at 100. Every third week would be only 50 miles so that I would have time to recover, and hopefully not get injured.

Training was going well, Mike and I were putting in 60 minutes to 90 minutes runs every morning and three times in the week, some faster running so that I did not lose all my speed.

I had one 3 hour run planned this was to be an “over time run”, running longer than my intended race time of 2 hours 30 at The London Marathon. We set off early when it was still dark so as to avoid the heat of the day, and after 60 minutes running round the Club La Santa track…in pitch black ( I listened to my mp3 to kill time) we headed off into the desert, over the rocky ground, which is the kind of terrain I love.

However my legs must still have been in shuffle mode from the track because I caught a bit of volcanic rock and went flying, landing with a thud and cutting my arm badly. The arm hurt so much that I didn’t notice I had also knocked my ankle and knee as well.

As all serious runners do, I ran back home washed the wound bandaged it up and tried to finish my 3 hour run. But pain got the better of me, as my wife Rieko battered some common sense into my brain. In times of trouble when I plan to do something stupid, She will always ask “what would you tell your athletes to do” the immediate and correct answer is of course “REST”

But as you know all runners think, MY body is different. It isn’t, but we all like to think that we are different and that the rules of common sense don’t apply to us.

I was however back running the next day and now 3 weeks later my arm has just about healed. At first I didn’t notice my swollen ankle, however by the end of the holiday it had started to ache and I realised it was becoming tender to touch. I must have hit it hard as I fell. In Lanzarote I had successfully completed 100 miles but at what cost to my preparation for The London Marathon.

Back in England I rested up and all seemed well. Over Xmas it was easy to find other things to do and when I started running after Xmas the pain had gone. I did some fast interval training in preparation for the Surrey X-C Championships on 3rd of January. I run for Belgrave Harriers and had a solid run, coming 15th. Just behind Will Cockerell our Captain in 14th. Phil Wicks won by a country mile and Belgrave took the team race. At my age I am still glad to be making up the team.

The start of January was cold the ground was frozen and rutted and unfortunately that cross country race was the last step I took. It is now 19th January and I am still not running. My ankle is still swollen and I have tendentious. I am getting treatment and it will recover, but through experience I know it is a slow process. So I have now adopted plan B to stay fit, which involves getting up early and going to my local gym Castle Royle before work each morning. For anyone who is injured and trying to stay fit, I shall outline some good sessions next time.

After 37 years of running, and countless middle distance track races, road and cross country races, and not to mention all the triathlons I did in my 20 years as a full time athlete, this year at the ripe old age of 46 I have decided to do my first marathon. I managed to get an elite start for London which gave me an guaranteed entry… so the London Marathon it is.

I won the British Universities 1,500m title over 26 years ago and after that turned professional as triathlete, retiring at 41, after getting up to 2nd in the world in the related sport of duathlon in 2003. I did manage one world title although all be it a masters title in 10,000m All those years when one would normally have thought about marathon running I was triathloning.( new verb)

My aims for this year after the London Marathon is to see how fast I can run on the track. I thought I would document my progress problems along the way, as it may be informative to new comers and also one or two of you may find it interesting.

My full time running career ended after I injured my left knee back in 1984 and was told I would never run again. It took me two years to get over that, but words such as never and impossible do not agree with me, so that was how I discovered cross training and triathlon as a way to rehabilitate and recover. Later, X-training became a natural way for me to stay injury free and to reach peak performance. Over the years I have studied at Loughborough, Long Beach, Leeds, Sheffield and Tsukuba University in Japan and also coached Olympic triathletes and so built a wide base of academic and practical experience. You would think I would have all the answers.

However I start off this blog rather embarrassingly INJURED ! ( I will let you know how that happened next time).

Since I am injured, the one key thing I have learnt is to make all negatives into a positive. Ok I have an ankle injury so I can’t run, but I can still use the stepper and X-trainer which are none impact and I can carry out a whole series of exercises in the gym to maintain muscle mass and of course I can use that spare time concentrating on what all runners hate…stretching.

I have also decided to run the Okinawa marathon 22nd February. Instead of doing lots of long runs I have entered the marathon so I can get my nutrition and fluid intake right under race conditions, and test my stamina. I will however limit my speed to about 85-90%. For those who are getting jealous about my apparent jet setting lifestyle…I have to go to Japan and Okinawa on work. I just thought I would squeeze a marathon in while there and combine work with pleasure ( or may it will be work and pain…not sure on that one!)

Having not run for 10 days now, all these plans look in jeopardy, but as the cliché says, life is a journey not a destination, with all the ups and downs I have had, I still love the journey, so I thought I would keep a blog to keep a record of may training and racing this year and all the highs and lows along the way.

Oh and one last comment for this entry, my estimated time. Well I never do anything in half measures so I set my self a tough target of sub 2:30… My reasoning if the target is too easy the challenge is no fun, if it is too tough you will just give up on route.