Dutch courage

Michael George is off to the Netherlands in the morning to compete in the Dutch 50km championships. I'm hoping that he will break the 5 hour target this time. He is hoping to get his news to Paul Jackson on Sunday to report on the http://www.manxharriers.com/ site.

I might be joining Michael for a coffee at Amsterdam airport tomorrow! I'm leaving the Island and hour and half ahead of him, flying to Manchester where I wait for 3 and a half hours for my flight during which time I will be joined by my son Ben, who is travelling from Hull by train. Michael and Irene fly to Birmingham at 8.30 but get to Amsterdam half an hour ahead of me.

I trained every day but one for almost five months for the Amsterdam Marathon which is to be held on Sunday. I made no secret of my desire to break 2.40 but I also admitted that the intensity of my training was putting me on a high risk strategy. Sure enough six weeks ago I succumbed to injury and have barely trained since (less than a marathon distance in total). A couple of weeks ago I decided that I would not take part but I would still go with Ben who is running the half marathon in the afternoon. I have done a couple of short runs this week and have been toying with the possibility of taking part at a much more modest pace. I know it is the wrong thing to do but it will take some Dutch courage to watch.

I'm taking my laptop with me so I hope to publish some photos of certain parts of Amsterdam!

Although I admit I got my training wrong, one thing I strongly believe in as that your training has to be based on the distance that you will race. I ran up to and past the marathon distance five times this summer (the slowest was 2.55 on a windy day) but guess what? The more my body got used to the distance the more consistent were my mile times and I had just about mastered an even pace marathon.

It is fascinating to publish Ed Gumbley's times from his brilliant Berlin Marathon a few minutes ago. The mile splits are from his Garmin and I then ran them through a spreadsheet to calculate the other splits. Even he was fading significantly during the last few miles.

The question is how do you train for a marathon to maintain an even pace without breaking down in training? I think that only about 5% of a marathon field achieve this - and they are usually in the top few percentage of finishers.

I had intended to publish the feature on Ed this morning but the photos of Gemma arrived from Andy Duncan. Thanks Andy. He has done such a good job for the media.