Ready for Greensands Marathon

Tomorrow I'm off to run in the Greensands Marathon in Dorking, Surrey.  This is billed as one of the toughest UK marathons.  It doesn't got particularly high, but there isn't much in the way of flat bits.  You can see the course profile here:

http://www.trionium.com/greensand/

I didn't do any running for about 10 days after the 92 mile Toad challenge.  My first foray back to running was taking the Sweaty Betty running club for a few 800m laps of Midsummer Common on 3rd October. 

The following weekend was then taken up with my other challenge of the year, which was to row the Channel with seven of my kettlebell clients.  We did this on Sunday 7th October.  Our only goal was to row across, have a good time and raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support.  To our great surprise we actually ended up breaking the course record by 16 minutes to set a new fastest time of rowing the Channel in a Cornish Adventure Gig of 4 hours 3 minutes.  You can read all about it on my other blog:

http://ckchannelrow.blogspot.co.uk/

I had a couple of easy days after the row and then ran again at the Sweaty Betty night the following Wednesday.  My next serious training run was to do two laps of a very hilly 4 mile loop around Royston Heath last Sunday.  I used to go to Royston Heath quite a lot a few years ago. I'd forgotten just how tough those hills are.  Hopefully, it's been good training for tomorrow's marathon.

Over the rest of the week I did an easy 6 mile run Tuesday morning, followed by an afternoon interval session with a client, and the usual Sweaty Betty night on Wednesday.  Then I just did an easy 5 mile run yesterday, just to get me out of the house later in the day.  I contemplated parkrun this morning, but realised I'd be making the mistake of going from doing hardly anything over a couple of weeks to suddenly a lot in one go.

I'm looking forward to getting out and running a rural, hilly marathon tomorrow.  I'm not looking forward to getting up and leaving at 7am.  As a result of tomorrow's marathon I'm also sacrificing an afternoon and evening out with friends, who are at the Oxjam day.  There's live music in four pubs from 12 noon to midnight.  Tickets cost £10 to all four venues with proceeds going to Oxfam.  I thought about going for a couple of hours, but didn't want to end up drinking and staying out later than I'd intended.  I would have gone earlier in the day, but none of my friends made it out until 5pm.