The joy of treadmills

Well, my training plan has deviated already.

A trip away from home for work meant that I wasn't able to do my first planned Sunday run. The common marathon advice is that it is OK to miss the occasional run, but not the long run. Oops.

Sunday is going to be my long run day once I get into it properly, for now, I need to get my legs into the habit of going out for a little jog so they're ready for the step up in training. Although it is not a disaster at this stage to miss that run, it is not something I want to get into the habit of!

To make up for the missing Sunday run, I took the opportunity to hit the gym in the hotel I was staying in. The treadmill had a 5k setting and so it seemed rude not to. the run was largely uneventful in itself, but I was made massively aware of the ease of which you can keep a steady pace when there's a machine to do it for you.

With the help of the treadmill, I did the 5k in a time of 24:18 which is about 7:50/mile pace which I was well happy with. Will be out for another lunchtime run tomorrow, whilst I don't expect to get anywhere near this time, I will be aiming to beat the time Mike and I set last week. I haven't told him this yet.

On this trip, I was  questioned on what my target time was for the marathon. Although my main aim is purely to survive the route, I will inevitably have a target time in mind once I am closer to the event. That's just the way I am with running, competitive at all times, even if only against myself.

I was introduced by a colleague to the formula of doubling a half marathon time, and adding twenty minutes. Having not yet completed a half marathon, I used some arbitrary maths to extrapolate my great south run times (10 miles), to then be doubled and added to, I found those times would give a finish of four hours twenty, disappointingly over my hopes of a four hour finishing time...

Although not committing to a finish time I did make the following statements about the following finishing times:

Five hours - "I would be WELL disappointed with a time over five hours"
Four hours - "I would be WELL happy with a sub four hour time"
Three hours - "If I come in below three hours, I'll be asking for a recount!"

Tonight, I did a quick change to my running tracking spreadsheet, and modified the predictor for various distances from a straight multiplication, which I always knew was flawed, to the following formula:

Marathon Time = Time x (26.2 / Distance) ^ 1.06
(taken from here)

Best of all, this multiplies up my 5k time to a predicted marathon finish time of 3:52 ish. Happy days.