Week ending 17th April - Marathon Week!

Tuesday - steady 6.5 miles steady - just ticking over

Sunday - London Marathon 3h25m25secs

Where do I start? I suppose I should say that the time was 10 minutes slower than the target of 3h15, and I had even speculated of a 3h10 and a good for age time so I had expected to be disappointed. On reflection I am not as frustrated as I thought I would have been as it was a great day and compared to 99% of the population my debut was better than any one else will do in there life time. I am still unsure what went wrong. I had until about 21 miles (my race memory is surprisingly poor - is this normal or was it fatigue?) been on target for the 3h15 but had for a mile or so been feeling my left hamstring twitching and suddenly I got cramp. This then plagued me consistently for the rest of the race every half a mile or so, and really effected my time. I did have to run more slowly after the cramp set in to keep it under control and on bird cage walk in the last mile I then got cramp in my left thigh whilst stretching the left hamstring. I then spent the next minute leaning against a lamp post swinging my leg backwards and forwards getting cramp in one whilst stretching out the other! I finally realised that if I held the leg at 90 degree's the leg relaxed and away I went, but I lost another 2 minutes.

The big question is what caused it? There are two major possibilities. The first being fatigue which is always possible but I did not feel exhausted and certainly fuelled myself well - water and carbs through gels and drink throughout the raw which I do not do in training so I felt pretty good. The other possibility (and the reason I would like to believe) is sweat/salt loss. What I have not said so far is that it was about 21 degrees celcius and by the end of the race had large patches of salt on my face and arms which I cannot recall ever happening before. Salt loss certainly causes cramp and with a winter training plan and all long races happening in the cold I am not used to the heat when running a long way.

Ultimately I will not know the reason as I will develop a salt replacement strategy and will train harder - more thoughts on this next week, but I will learn from it for sure.

Nevertheless I had a great day and wonderful support from a lot of family who came to watch and the roadside thousands who roared their support too was great