What a difference a week makes!!

I have to admit to feeling a little dejected this week. That poor race at the Northern Road Relays last Sunday really hit me hard. As I touched on in my last blog, I know exactly what the problem was and that was quite simply a case of overtraining. I'm fortunate enough to have an experienced and knowledgeable coach in Norman Poole, who is quick to see the telltale signs and knew exactly what I needed to do to get me right again.

We'd taken a gamble on training through the race as we agreed the result wasn't important in the overall scheme of things but it still hits you hard when you've had a crap result and you've been giving it everything! Looking back, training through the race was essential with the marathon ahead and I just have to put it behind me. What I needed this week was to regroup: get my legs back together and get some confidence back because apart from last weekend, everything has been going swimmingly well!

A very easy training week indeed started with a very slow 9 miler on Monday to try to recover. Felt tonnes better on Tuesday starting slow and then picking up on my first run of 6 miles. Then I did a nice steady 12 miler in the evening with Andy and Pete Riley and we were clipping along quite nicely with most of the run at sub 6:30 miling. Wednesday we were on the track at Wythenshawe Park and my session was 5x800m at 5k race pace with a 2min rest. The last two ended up being 2-3secs quicker than 5k pace but it felt pretty good. Then it was just easy running (7 miles Thursday, 4 miles Saturday) and resting up (Friday) for Sunday's Wilmslow Half Marathon. This race included the England Half Marathon Championships.

What a difference a week makes. After feeling so rotten last week and getting such a shocking result, I needed the opposite this week. As mentioned last time, I'm pretty philosophical about Half Marathons in the run up to a marathon with my two best times of 65:24 and 65:50 achieved en route to 2:21 clockings, whereas my best two marathons 2:18:34 and 2:18:53 have come on the back of 66:19 and 67:24. My logic is that I started my marathon training too early for those halfs and my end product is now better as I peak for the right race! I said last week that anything under 67 would show me that I'm where I need to be.

I was also conscious that with me starting my build up for London later than planned that I want to be able to get some good training in over the next two weeks so didn't want to completely trash myself.

I set off in the 67:00 group and the first 5 miles just flew by, in total contrast to last week I was so relaxed, happily sharing conversation with another runner who was running at target marathon pace, singing (!) and acknowledging some of the spectators I recognised. This is just how I wanted to feel and it was bloody fantastic!! The miles went by so much faster than usual and what was an incredibly large group at 4 miles was whittled down to 4 of us at 9 miles. At this stage I was in 12th position but moved into a finishing position of 6th place with my 13th mile my fastest of the race. My finishing time of 66:54 was pretty much spot on what I was looking for, the huge bonus was that it felt so comfortable and it's left me buzzing again.

One month to go!!

My training is all currently geared towards the Virgin London Marathon, which is taking place on Sunday April 25th. Training has been going well, everything has gone pretty much to plan so far with the biggest mileage weeks out of the way and the focus now switching from lots of marathon paced running to road racing and some faster 5k and 10k paced sessions.

I have completed seven marathons now and trained for another three (two DNFs and a DNS) and so I have a fair bit of experience and have learnt some things the hard way. I was only 23 when I ran my first marathon in 2002 and it was a euphoric experience, a pleasing debut of 2:21:01. I ran the next five London Marathons improving one second in 2003 (!) then running 2:18:53 in 2004 and then my personal best 2:18:34 in 2005. I was beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about as I'd never really had any bad experiences, but as the body has got older, I have found it more difficult to withstand the training. In 2006, I ran my slowest London 2:23:26 in a tremedous amount of pain, later to be diagnosed as a double hernia! My last attempt at a London was in 2007 when I succumbed to the warm conditions and withdrew from the race at halfway.

But it is more recently that I have had my biggest problems. An attempted return to the marathon in 2008 ended in disaster when a niggle I carried into the Florence Marathon caused me to develop cramp early in the race and I again withdrew midrace. And then an attempt at training for the Loch Ness Marathon was going very well until I developed bursitis on my heel and I was forced to withdraw. This injury has come and gone ever since and I'm currently undergoing twice weekly physio at Athlete Matters in Worsley. The injury recurred badly in February and meant that I started my build up for London a week later than I'd hoped but I've since managed to keep on top of it so far.

The injury forced me to reduce my usual training load for the first part of the winter and this coincided with probably my best ever spell of racing with a 10k personal best, the best race of my life at the UK Cross Challenge in Liverpool plus an England International vest at Cross Country. Given how well I raced off much lower mileage for a long period of time and the years of high mileage I have accumulated, I am not afraid now to lower my mileage for the final 4-5 weeks of my marathon build up and regain those fresh legs now that I have topped them up with a good block of training. And boy do they need freshening!

Starting late meant I have piled a lot of work into the last five weeks and I've been treading that fine line between improving fitness and overcooking it. I crossed that line last week, attempting to train through the Northern Road Relays which I was taking part in for my club Altrincham & District AC. Coming into Sunday's relay I had racked up 105 miles in 7 days with a 20 mile race the previous Sunday, a 17 mile run on the Thursday and a testing session of 8x1000m at 10k race pace with a couple of hill sprint sessions thrown in for good measure. It's easy to see why I felt so rough and had such a poor performance (uncharacteristic of me recently) but there have been many instances in the past of me being able to absorb this level of training, and myself and my coach Norman Poole felt that it was a gamble we would take.

A great example of this is when I was training for Loch Ness last summer. I ran the Morpeth 10k race in the middle of a 113 mile training week expecting a fairly easy ride and ended up finishing 3rd in 31:10. Two weeks later with fresher legs, I ran a 10k on the track in 29:55. I think the key is to recognise when you have crossed that line and back off accordingly, so I look on Sunday's poor run as an amber traffic light!

This Sunday is the Wilmslow Half Marathon, which incorporates the England Athletics Half Marathon Championships. I am pretty philosophical about Half Marathons before a marathon. I have ran 65mins twice for a half marathon (2002 and 2003), with a 2:21 marathon clocking following on both occasions. Yet my 2:18s came on the back of a 66:19 and a 67:24. The reason behind this I feel is that I started much earlier in 2002 and 2003 and probably peaked for the Half Marathon whereas when I ran my 2:18s off slower half times having started my marathon training a month later.

For this reason, I won't be heading into Wilmslow anticipating a personal best time. Based on the above, anything under 67mins will tell me that I am well on course. But after such a poor race last weekend, I really don't want to be too far outside 67 and feeling like I'm killing myself in doing so.

The story so far

If I was to try to talk you through my 18 years of competitive running so far, I could be here for quite some time. Fortunately, the internet is such a wonderful resource now. There is one excellent website, The Power of 10, which allows you to search any athlete and lists all of their race performances, provided they have met the site's qualifying criteria.

Link to my past race performances and personal best times.

For the last few years, I have been recording all of my training and racing on the Eightlane website. Click here to view my past training logs.

One of the reasons I decided to start blogging and posting my training on the internet is because I think that my story can offer inspiration to juniors and young seniors who aren't at the top but have the desire to progress and achieve what they can. The very first race result I have a copy of at home was an U15 boys race within the South East Lancs Cross Country League. I finished 48th out of 52. My first National Cross Country Championship was 1998 where I finished 52nd in the U20 race, the following year I was 29th and since then I have ran in every National with finishing positions of 96th, 72nd, 18th, 23rd, 27th, 37th, 29th, 18th, 27th and 18th. It was only this year that at the age of 31 I finally represented England at Cross Country. Consistency has been key - I haven't had more than six successive days off since 1996 and as I have slowly improved, I have believed in myself more and more. I still don't think of myself as talented or elite but work very hard and know that when I am running well I can compete with all but a handful of runners in the UK. If just one young athlete reading this takes some inspiration from this then writing this blog will be worthwhile.

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to my blog. Some of you reading this will already know me. For the benefit of those that do not, a brief introduction is in order!

My name is Dave Norman, I'm 31 years young and I have been running competitively with Altrincham & District Athletic Club for 18 years now! I have enjoyed some success, with international vests at the Marathon, Cross Country and Mountain Running but I have yet to achieve my own personal holy grail of competing in a major championship. I have set this blog up to chart the highs and the lows of my ongoing training and racing, hopefully you will enjoy reading it and take some inspiration away from it yourself.

Any of the small successes I have enjoyed have not come easy. Distance running is a very demanding sport, which requires consistent training (for me this typically entails 2 hours per day) and a tremendous amount of discipline. You need to be prepared to train in any weather, at 7am or 10pm if other commitments necessitate, you need to have some discipline with your diet and social life and you need to think about your running when making pretty much any lifestyle decision. I definitely DO NOT advocate no social life, no junk food and no booze as those who know me well will fully be aware! Having a balance is important and I'd like to think I have it where it should be. But it should be obvious that boozing til 3am followed by a takeaway 3-4 nights a week will not lead to successful athletic performance!

Running is a big part of my life, even away from training and competition. I live in Denton, Manchester with three other runners (Matt Bond, a Romanian Marius Ionescu who is training and competing abroad right now and my brother Andy). I work as an Assistant Manager at a specialist running shop - Sweatshop in Hyde - and have done so for five years now. I also organise road and track races in the local area as well as working for the British Milers Club. It's a crazy and hectic life that probably sounds like I'm rather one dimensional but I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm currently just over four weeks away from the London Marathon which I have been training very hard for and hope to improve on my best time of 2:18:34. This year, there are two major championships - The European and Commonwealths - and the qualifying standard for the British team for both championships is 2:18:00. I will update this blog again over the course of this week to update you on my training so far and how I feel things are progressing.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this, if you are a runner yourself, I hope your own training is going well. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them! Until next time!!