Marathon #7: Second Attempt - Melbourne Marathon - 18 October 2015

Begin Again

After the disheartening outcome of my last race, I resolved to move on and start anew. I've already signed up for the Melbourne Marathon in June, I just needed to tweak my original plan for the year and drop the Ultra Tan race to give myself time to recover and build up momentum for the next round of training. 

Medibank is celebrating it's 15th year as the major sponsor of the Melbourne Marathon Festival and it's the 37th year of the Melbourne Marathon racing event itself. 

I really wanted to do better in the race this year, and since my ITBS acted up during the Sri Chimnoy Marathon, I sought out the professional help of a chiropractor and a remedial massage therapist. I've also signed up for the Bangkok Marathon at this point which was happening 4 weeks after the Melbourne Marathon, so I just want to make sure that I prevent any kind of injury for my back-to-back races - backing out is no longer an option!

After running for 2 hours and 50 minutes - the longest run I did during training

I continued following Fitness Blender workouts as well. They're great for cross-training, especially for improving core strength, stability and flexibility which are very important when running. They're also my default fallback during the days when I find excuses for myself to skip my running training program - and believe me, I found lots of excuses, despite the dismal outcome of my last race. However, I tried my hardest to complete the long weekend runs to build endurance.

Marathon #7: First Attempt - Sri Chimnoy Princes Park Winter Running Festival - 19 July 2015

So it's been over a year since I've written anything in the blog. It's because I haven't finished a full marathon since last year's Melbourne Marathon. However, that doesn't mean that I haven't been running in the last 12 months.

At the beginning of the 2015, I was very ambitious with my running goals. I was planning on finishing 4 full marathons this year namely:

• Sri Chimnoy Princes Park Winter Running Festival - 19 July 
• The Tan Ultra - 9 August
• Melbourne Marathon - 18 October
• Bangkok Marathon - 15 November

I signed up for the Sri Chimnoy race in February, giving myself 5 months to train which should've been the ideal amount of time to spend on training for a full marathon race. However, my work schedule and my state of mind just didn't allow me to train as much and as hard as I wanted to. I was ready to give up training any day on the first hint of excuse that I could find - I'm tired... it's too cold outside... it's raining... I tried to make up for it with running on the treadmill and cross training with Fitness Blender but I knew from the get-go that this was not going to be enough. 

On the week of the race, I knew I wasn't ready. But since I already got the race bib, I told myself I should still give it a try. 

Day of Reckoning

This Sri Chimnoy race was also happening in the middle of winter, so this would be my first time to run in really cold weather. When I say cold weather, I was expecting somewhere between 5 to 10 degrees Celsius.

Marathon #6: Melbourne Marathon - 12 October 2014

Melbourne Marathon: Run as One

I decided to participate in the Melbourne Marathon again, a week after I finished the Great Ocean Road Marathon in May 2014. I ran my fastest marathon yet at the Melbourne Marathon in 2013, and since it has one of the easier race routes that I've run on, I thought I can try for another PR this year. 

http://melbournemarathon.com.au/

The Training Plan

I set my training plan through the Adidas micoach app, with a finish time goal of 4 hours. I know, this was a little bit ambitious, but I wanted the extra challenge thinking that by training harder, I'd be able to train my body to sustain a consistent fast pace for the whole duration of the race. I wasn't really gunning for 4 hours, but if I can finish in less than 4 hours and 30 minutes, I'll be a happy camper.

Aside from the running training plan, I also signed up for the "8-week program for Busy People" of Fitness Blender. It's a 6 times a week workout program that only takes up 30 minutes or less of your time. It is run by a married couple, both of whom are professional personal trainers, via their youtube channel. The way they do it is they write up the whole program and reference the free youtube videos in the book which you purchase and download. For just a very small amount ($10), you get 8 weeks' worth of coaching which I found very effective since I can do all the workouts from the comfort of our home without any other extra fees other than the amount I paid to download their book - this was worth every cent I paid. And at the end of the 8 weeks, you can do it all over again without paying anything extra - how cool is that?