North East Running

Did it. 2:58:29 To read about the training plan and the back story check out the post below: https://northeastrunning.blogspot.com/2022/05/sub-three-hour-marathon-training-plan.html In summary though - train (really) hard + get your nutrition right. The plan was to try and average just under 4:10/km throughout. Gels at 30 mins. 100ml water at each stop. If it went dream like I'd be around 2:55:00. If I fell of a cliff with 8km left I might hang on to 3:00:00. And... (Weather was perfect in terms of wind - maybe slightly too warm - pretty flat throughout - no more than +100m of climbing over 42km) Overview Not bad pacing - lost it a tiny bit at the end So breaking it down into the splits - the first 35km were pretty much spot on. The adrenlin, the reasonably easy three weeks leading up to the day, it felt a bit like a hard training run. Even had the chance to chat a little and just concentrate on a good technique and taking the gels and the water. Then for km 36 and 37 I started to

Just about ready to do the Edinburgh Marathon - desperate for a sub-three hour time. Learned two things from a failed three hour attempt at York  (3:05:05) - (A) Train harder and (B) Take energy gels every 30 mins and not every 45 mins. This is what my training plan was... Build up the base fitness Put in seven hard weeks of good paced increasingly long, long runs Three weeks of easing it down Step 1. Build up the base fitness To do a sub-three hour marathon you have to be a pretty good runner to start with. So the assumption here is that no one would start this plan unless they have a half-marathon time of comfortably within 1hr25. That would be the first milestone before starting this plan. I did 2-3 months of easy paced 25km (15-16mi) Sunday runs. This was part of a 75-85km (50mi) training week mixing fast sessions with easy sessions. A typical 25km run was as follows. Around 5:15/km pace, maybe slower if it's hilly. But doing 2-3 months of these every Sunday gives the base that

I absolutely love parkruns and try to do lots of different locations and also when a new one comes out in the area I need to run it as soon as possible. However, I'm always quite keen to know the route and also see what the elevation profile is. The parkrun event website's are good - but not that good. No elevation and the route map is very hard to follow. So this blog post shows how to do a bit of research before you turn up (and it works for any race to be fair - not just parkruns). Both tips below use Strava Segments as the source of info - the first is when there is a full strava segment of the course and the second when there is not. 1. Option 1 - Full Course Strava Segment If you are lucky then the Strava Segment Explore will show the full parkrun as a segment. This particular feature of Strava seems to only bring up a limited amount of segments in the area - but fingers crossed there will be one for the course. The screenshots below show my research into Meadowmill parkr