Weight progress ticker

Thursday 31 March 2011

2 days in - everything feels good

So I've done Tuesday and Wednesday according to my training plan - Wednesday felt a bit heavier than Tuesday but overall no big problems. My biggest concern is the injury factor as I am quite heavy, I feel like I need to lose weight quickly so that I can ease the strain on my knees/ankles. That's also why I have decided to stop drinking alcohol until 2 weddings I am attending in May.

 I am running at about 10min/mile which for me seems a good pace - if I could keep that up and just further the distances, that would be ideal. Today is a swim day so I hope that will work some different muscle groups and give me enough rest for my run tomorrow all though in my body I feel like I could run today as well.

The other thing I want to do is to head into Moti - a running shop in Reading where they measure you're feet, analyze your running style and suggest some decent running shoes. I will do this on Saturday.

Tuesday 29 March 2011

The Training Plan

So I was in Munich a couple of weeks ago to visit an old school friend and I made it my goal to make it "the final blow-out". I think I can safely say that was achieved.

I figured in order for me to take this thing seriously I would cut out alcohol completely from the time I got back and so far (in 1 week) I am doing ok. I am known as a bit of a drinker so this in itself is going to be a tough challenge as well but I figured it will help me lose weight quicker. I need to lose weight in order to decrease the pressure on my joints when I'm running and hopefully that will come with time.

So last week I was back and not drinking and I started designing a training plan. I found an online article called "Tackling the big one" by some magazine or site called ultra fit, and so I have designed a training programme from that. I ran 5.5 miles in total last week and swam another 1.5 miles so that gave me an idea of where to begin. From that, I have designed the following:


I did some light swimming yesterday - which is not in the training plan but I wanted to get some pointers on my technique to make my swimming more effective, that was done and so into the plan we go!

The 2 mile run today was fairly good. It felt easy for the first 1.5 miles or so. Let's see how I feel towards the end of the week. The training programme does extend to Sept/October for a full marathon so my aim is to get there ASAP then keeping it up until next year. This way I can compensate for injury/holidays etc.

Feel free to give me some advice on the programme, I'm hoping it's going to work out.

All the best,

Erik

The goals

So after reading the intro, I realized I hadn't exactly spelled out the goals properly. So here is what I aim to do:

Me and my best mate (Jonny) are aiming to run a marathon in April 2012 - we therefore have 1 year to train. I want to try and get into the London one but if that doesn't happen, then I will try Brighton or Blackpool which I believe are in the same month.

I will be running for a local charity - the Duchess of Kent House in Reading which is a cancer charity which I also do volunteering for.

I will update you all with my training plan at some point as well.

-Erik

Couch potato to marathon runner

Hi all,

Welcome to my blog - I'm a bit new to this so it will probably be somewhat uninteresting to begin with I am hoping in time that I become better at this, part of the reason for writing a blog is to hold myself accountable to achieve the goal I have set myself.

So, a bit of background; for those of you who don't know me I am a very goal-oriented person and I need goals in most things I do in order to actually achieve something. I've recently gone through a big break-up and so I guess part of the reason for doing this is because I feel I need something HUGE to aim for and what better than to train for a marathon?

Again, for those of you who don't know me - I am a bit overweight (see picture below) and so this is going to help with that too.

Hope you keep reading - feel free to offer some words of encouragement, it will be much appreciated.

All the best

Erik