Sweet sweet tapering

After a few weeks of doing 15/17/19 mile long runs in addition to shorter ones in the week, tapering feels good. With only one week to go until the race, it was a treat to head out for a leisurely 8-miler around Hyde Park, under perfect blue, plane-free skies with Howard. Seeing folk having picnics under trees in full blossom was a big change from the slip-slidey run we did back in January.

With only two more short training runs to go, this week is all about the pasta and giving my legs a relative rest before the big day. The nerves are starting to kick in, as I thought they would. Nothing I do now can improve my readiness for the gruelling task ahead, but it’s tempting to think that just adding a mile on here or there will help. It won’t, so from here in it’s all about summoning the mental strength to get through.

My legs will get a huge boost from knowing I’ve raised over £1200 towards my £1600 fundraising target for Shelter, with over £500 coming from deep-pocketed friends who piled round last Friday to be fed a world of carbohydrates (think Come Dine With Me, but with more pasta). If you’d like to help me get a little further towards my target, please donate over at my justgiving page.

I’ve started running with RunMeter, a neat little app which tracks route progress and plots it on a map. The neatest features about it is its ability to tweet location / pace updates and read out replies. If you’re a tweeter you can follow me at @simonruns to check how I’m progressing around the course, and you can send me messages of encouragement to be fed into my ear.

Will you be watching the race? Let me know if you are, and where, and I’ll try and look out for you. I reckon I’ll be finishing between 4h30m and 5h. And then having a very long sit down.

  • Days to go: 6
  • Calories per day: at least 3000
  • Money left to raise: £392
  • Volume of ash in lungs: increasing
  • Likelihood of winning marathon due to elite athletes being stranded by ash: also increasing

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