Last Marathon of the Year

This weekend I completed my last marathon of the year, but it didn't go all to plan.  You might remember that my goal for the year was to run 4 marathons and 4 ultra marathons.  By ultra marathon I had originally intended this to mean 4 ultra marathon events, which were going to be:

XNRG two day Isle of Wight Ultra in June
XNRG three day Thames Path Ultra in September
London to Brighton in October
XNRG three day Ridgeway Ultra in November

The first two ultra events were completed successfully enough.  I then decided not to run London to Brighton as it was going to be just one week before the planned row of the English Channel, which I hadn't even contemplated doing at the start of the year.  I didn't want to do anything that could potentially jeopardize the row, especially as I was doing it with seven of my clients.  I was going to argue that I replaced an ultra with rowing the Channel, which was a pretty awesome event in it's own right.

So I had already pretty much decided to only do three ultra running events.  My four marathons were then going to be Paris, Greensands and the Broadmeadow Double, i.e. two marathons in one weekend.

As you know, in running the Greensands marathon I picked up an annoying little injury to my peroneal muscles on my right leg.  This put me out of action for a few weeks and meant missing the Ridgeway Ultra.  I was really looking forward to this event, so was very disappointed at having to cancel it.  I thought I was all fixed, but the injury flared up again yesterday after completing day 1 of the Broadmeadow Double.  I decided to strap it up and sleep on it and make a judgement this morning as to whether or not I should run.  

As soon as I got out of bed I knew that I wasn't going to be running anywhere today.  The course of the marathon was basically three 8 to 9 mile loops that kept returning to the race HQ.  So I wrestled with the idea of just trying to run the first loop, knowing I could easily pull out at 8 miles. But I realised that this was going to be a stupid and pointless venture that wouldn't achieve anything other than making my injury worse.  So I went to the race start to tell the organiser that I was withdrawing and I then returned to Cambridge and spent the afternoon completing my Christmas shopping.

However, I considered the runs that I have done this year and I feel I can argue that the original goal has been fulfilled, if you look at it in the following way.

Runs completed in 2012:
Paris marathon
Isle of Wight - day 1 - 38 miles
                      - day 2 - 31 miles
Thames Path Ultra - day 1 - 27 miles (let's call it a marathon)
                                 - day 2 - 33 miles
                                 - day 3 - 32.5 miles
Greensands marathon
Broadmeadow marathon

So that is 4 marathons and 4 runs that were longer than 30 miles.  So who's going to argue that I didn't achieve my goal?

I'll be writing a review of Broadmeadow marathon a little later.