Great Wall of China Marathon Blog: Week One
It’s Week One and I can already feel this is going to be one of the hardest things I have ever done! To be honest a lot of the pain I will probably experience over the next few weeks is completely self-inflicted and down to my bad planning. I got the crazy idea to sign up to this marathon back in December last year after watching a documentary about the Great Wall and signing up before the program had even finished. (Doesn’t take much for me to jump on an impulse!) However maths has never been my strongest attribute and I soon realised that it was going to be only 8 weeks after completing my last marathon! ARHHHH How am I ever going to do it?????
The first thought that came into my mind when I crossed the finish line at the Barcelona Marathon two weeks ago was ‘I’m not going to be able to do China.’ After being so excited and confident in the weeks building up to Barcelona about how much I was looking forward to the challenge of China, the pain and fatigue you feel after completing a marathon just takes over. I did achieve a PB of 3 hours 41 minutes but I really felt it in my legs. The scary thing is Barcelona was a fairly flat road race, how am I going to tackle the mountain of hills of the Great Wall let alone the 5,000 stairs?
I don’t have children, but from what I hear, I can imagine the feeling in comparative. After two days of walking around like a penguin and feeling like my legs were never going to un-stiffen, my body started working again and by day three I was starting to think ‘Come on girl you can do it!’ So my story begins……..
After giving myself a full four days off of running, I decided it was time to get my trainers back on and give it a go and see how my legs felt. MISTAKE! I ran for about half an hour, and although there was no pain or soreness my legs just didn’t feel like they belonged to me. My legs were obviously still very fatigued so I decided to give myself another few days off. By the following week I was back on track. I did a few runs in the week with some interval work and was feeling pretty good. Then I did my strength session which involved lots of squatting, lunging and a lot of single leg work. The next day my legs were on FIRE! Having not done a strength session in over 4 weeks I was definitely de-conditioned. It put a slight wobble in my confidence again and I decided I needed to work a bit harder if I didn’t want to hurt myself.
So at the weekend I prepared myself for my long run and forced myself to go to Richmond Park. I just knew I had to unwillingly do some serious hill training. I looked at my program at seven weeks to race day and I should have been aiming to do 18 miles……WHAT?!?!?! I decided I would just stick with 14 mile and slowly build up again. So on sore legs from my strength session I set off around Richmond Park, on what must have been the windiest day we have had so far this year! Every direction I turned I felt like the wind was just pushing against me and pulling me back. I just had to tell myself that it was all good training and it would be worth it in the end. I was completely windswept and my legs felt sore but I still got the same elation of the feeling of finishing a run. Whether it was a rush of adrenaline and endorphins or whether it was just the thought ‘thank god I don’t have to do that distance again…… until next week !’…………