I have have a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde symptom when it comes to organisation. In my work life, I’m very organised. In my personal life I’m a lot more haphazard, very untidy and a bit rubbish at planning in advance.
Fortunately, I’m quite obstinate (or, putting a positive spin on that, ‘disciplined’) so once I got my head out from the sand and made a training plan I was ok at sticking to it.
Obstacle 1: Getting round to making a plan
I’ve run a half marathon before, but my running level for the last 18 months had been a 5-6 mile run two or three times a week. As soon as you look at any marathon training plans you’ll see that this doesn’t really help much – as I’ve never focused on progression, just keeping up a certain level of fitness.
For the first few months of training, I kept up with my few runs a week, but realised that this wasn’t really helping me to improve. Fortunately, for Christmas I was given a copy of ‘The Marathon and Half Marathon : A Training Guide’ by Graeme Hilditch. This was a much needed shove for me – I’d never gotten around to typing ‘marathon training plan’ into Google, which was obviously a bit of an avoidance tactic. I realised that being generally fit wasn’t good enough. I needed to make a plan.
Obstacle 2: Actually making a plan
As you can tell, I didn’t have too much experience to go on. So the book was massively helpful. There are lots of books and websites and magazines available. I found that the difficulty was actually sitting down to read one and then translating that into something that I could follow.
I vaguely followed the beginner’s marathon training plan, with some elements of the advanced plan added in. I realised that neither quite suited me, so I picked bits from both.
Obstacle 3: Getting myself to follow a plan
I’m very objective driven. Consequently, if I’m not able to meet an objective, I’ll find that quite difficult to deal with. This meant that I couldn’t write a plan out fully – because if life threw up unexpected events that ruined my plan, I’d get quite knocked off course by missing a particular target.
So I knew in my head vaguely what I needed to achieve each week, and the key distance milestones for the months leading up to the event. I noted down in my diary when I planned to run, but never how far or where.
I still, on the whole, managed to train 5 times a week, and met the milestones for distances at key points. So my plan was never a firm table drawn up and stuck to the fridge door and ticked off. If you’re able to do that, I think it’d really help. But having the plan vaguely sketched out and clear in my mind was enough to get me to progress whilst not allowing it to take over my every waking thought.
