Progress, Nutrition, and Next Marathon Ambitions

A Year of Growth and the Road Ahead

Published October 28, 2024

A year has flown by—filled with ups, downs, all in the pursuit of one goal: getting faster. Life, especially with family responsibilities, has been busy. But with a 5K and 10K PB, things are progressing. So let’s recap the year, look at what helped me run these PBs, and announce the start of training for the 2025 Ghent Marathon.

The start of the year wasn’t exactly ideal. Like a lot of people, I enjoyed the festive season a little too much; I was out of shape, derailing my sub-20-minute 5k goal that I had been working hard on in 2023. It was tough to get up to speed again (literally). So I began the year with a focus on interval training and started to dial in my nutrition too, which eventually led to one of my new PB’s this year: a 00:45:17 track 10,000m in June.

So how did the year start, well with a disappointing New Year’s Day parkrun, I took it to mean, it was time to get to work. So, in January, I embraced some of my own ad-hoc ideas for intervals. For example, I did sessions like 12 x 2 minutes at hard efforts with 45 seconds rest. I also continued with the Tuesday ‘7 by 1k’ workout that I had already been seeing progress from in the later part of 2023 (discussed in a previous blog post here). Later in February, I found a local organised (by City Runs) Inspirational Intervals group with running coach Hannah Bown (I continue to join as many Thursday sessions as I can). And it was this winter’s and spring’s training that got me to the 10,000m PB in July.

But, as is often the case, life doesn’t always follow a straight line. Over the summer, my fitness slipped again. Excuses, kind of yeah, but too much holiday food combined with a dodgy hotel treadmill, and daily 35°C heat led me to run very little for two whole weeks. However, after the holiday with six weeks of hard effort, I managed to pull myself back into shape for a 00:12:17 finish in a 3,000m track race—a result I’m quite proud of.

There was one other notable race this year: the Grizzly in Sidmouth, a 20-mile challenge unlike any other I’ve tackled before. I took on the race without a dedicated training block, having been offered a spot just a week before. The Grizzly is well known for being a brutal, muddy, and hilly adventure, with a mix of tough terrain, steep climbs, and unpredictable weather—definitely not your average road race. Despite the lack of preparation, the experience was incredible and reminded me why I love running: for the unexpected challenges and the chance to push beyond what I thought I could handle.

Recently, I’ve also been using a regular 12-minute 3k treadmill test to gauge my current fitness level. It’s a simple but effective way to track my progress and keep myself honest about where I’m at. Now that I’ve achieved a 00:12:17 on the track for the 3,000m, I’ve started setting my sights on a new goal: running a 4k in 16 minutes as a stepping stone towards my ultimate goal of a sub-20 minute 5k. And I ran this 4k time twice now.

Another major shift for me this year has been in the area of nutrition, inspired by a few books that really made an impact. The first is “Ultra-Processed People” by Dr. Chris van Tulleken, which opened my eyes to just how much of our diet is filled with ultra-processed foods and their impact on health and energy levels. The second book, “The Great Cholesterol Con” by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, made me rethink everything I thought I knew about cholesterol and how it relates to nutrition, brain and heart health. Then the book “Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back” by Dr. Catherine Shanahan especially highlighted that our bodies cannot effectively process seed oils, which in reality are very harmful to our mitochondria. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that I needed to stop consuming seed oils entirely—and you should too. 

After reading these books, I have stopped eating food that contain emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners and other additives such as flavouring, and avoid all foods that contain or are cooked with seed oils such as rapeseed oil (which has been quite challenging, as rapeseed oil is everywhere). 

Another book I read this year that’s worth mentioning is, “The Fast Diet” by Michael Mosley. This book has given me a perspective on intermittent fasting, both on how it’s good for your body and on weight loss — and it’s been pretty effortless to implement (or at least that’s what I have found).

I could, and perhaps should, write a whole post about how these books have positively impacted my running, but for now I just say collectively these books have changed how I look at food, and what I eat has (or don’t eat) has made huge difference, for example I seem to recover from hard efforts very quickly now.

Looking ahead to next year, I’m excited to see how far I can push myself. For endurance, I have signed up for the 2025 Ghent Marathon, but I am not ready to set a time goal yet (hopefully, I can change the one I gave on sign-up when I am ready). For speed, I continue to chase a sub-20 5K dream (and sub-21 is now within reaching distance) and to get as close to a 40-minute 10k as possible. Writing this feels way more ambitious than a sub-20 5K, but I’m ready to put in the work—both on the road and track as well as in the kitchen—to get there. I know there will be more ups and downs, but that’s part of the journey, and I’m ready to embrace it all.

Now that I have started training for the 2025 Ghent Marathon, I will try and go back to doing regular updates. So please do stay tuned to my blog. Also, encase you had not noticed, I started importing my old Computing Blog onto this website and have even written some new Computing content, if your into Software Engineering check it out — it’s getting more traffic to my website than my running posts which wasn’t intended (I just wanted to keep the cloud services cost down). 

Anyway, enjoy your running.