Two sleeps to go until my wife and I run the Victoria Marathon.

This is will be the second marathon we’ve run and I’m feeling a lot better about this one. I injured my foot while training for the first race and missed about 6 weeks of preparation, including all the longest training runs – the furthest I’d run before the race was about 25km, well short of the 42.2km distance of the race itself.

That made the race very tough.

The first half of the race was good (2hr 20 ish) but with my lack of training we were going too quick and I started feeling ill about 28km in. I had to take an extensive walk break to avoid throwing up and everything went downhill from then on. My calves felt like rock and it was a struggle to run for more than a few minutes. There was a lot of walking in the last 10km – let’s leave it at that. We finished the course in 5 hours 29 minutes which was at least an hour slower than we’d trained for. I did pick up a lot of free gels though.

This time, I made it through all sixteen weeks of training okay. My foot still gives me trouble, despite having a whole host of exercises to try to fix the root cause of the problem – probably because I don’t do the exercises as much as I should – but it’s not enough to interfere with the training.

We’re heading out this afternoon and I’m already really looking forward to the race. Victoria is a beautiful city, the course is great and the weather’s looking perfect. We’ve been pretty disciplined about our training and I have a new nutrition plan for the race that should keep my energy topped up without making me want to hurl. So, barring disasters, we should end up finishing some time between 4 hrs 30 and 5 hrs.

Whatever happens, we’re registered for next year’s Vancouver marathon so we’ll be back on the streets a couple of weeks from now. Maybe I should reread  Haruki Murakami’s book on running to inspire me.