Week 1: Training for the Manchester Marathon
And the hard work begins.
Published January 29, 2023
I have begun training for the 2023 Manchester marathon this week, which will also be my first marathon ever. And the first week of training went well.
Over the coming 12 weeks, I’ll share my training log at the end of each week. Here is my first log.
On Monday, it was a very easy run of just 4 km with my 8-year-old daughter Hanna, who was riding alongside me on her bike.
Tuesday should have been a 40–50-minute easy run however my work needed me to visit London (a 3-hour journey each way). So, I got up early and did three sets of 8 minutes on my rowing machine with a 1-minute 30-second rest between. I didn’t fancy the icy weather outside.
Wednesday was an 830-calorie supervised cardio session consisting of 3 x 10-minute blocks at 70% of my max heart rate, followed by a 20-minute block at 95% of my max heart rate on the treadmill.
Then in the evening, I ran in the City Runs’ Exmouth 5-miler. It’s a flat two-lap out and back along Exmouth’s seafront. I managed to do the 5 miles in 36 minutes and 17 seconds. That’s over a minute faster than the same time last year.
On Tuesday, I took a rest day.
Friday was a 1000-calorie cardio session consisting of 3 x 10-minute blocks at a minimum of 144 bpm, followed by a 25-minute fartlek treadmill run. The fartlek consisted of sets of 1-minute fast and 1-minute jogs.
I also ran an easy 5 km on the treadmill in the evening.
Saturday started with a kids and parents Synergy 360 workout with Hanna. As the workout is for kids, it isn’t all that hard, but I did find the jump squats hard work, and I used 275 calories. Later was another very easy run of 4 km with Hanna riding alongside me on her bike.
Sunday was a 25 km long run. I decided to run it with a zone 2 heart rate. It was the first time I tried running at such a low heart rate, and it took almost 3-hours to finish. I have no plans to run relatively slow again anytime soon, as it took so long to cover the ground, and I found it painful near the end. But it was a good experiment.
Finally, my wife, two daughters, and I attended a fun family sports day event organised by our local tennis club. Our family came second out of eight families.
