Abingdon Marathon :o)

We won't be there this weekend, although lots of our friends are running or supporting. Maybe it's just as well, because Leon has been bitten by a Martcrag Moor mosquito and has malaria. Or maybe it's just man-flu and an over-imaginative doctor in the house. Whatever it is, if his temperature doesn't come down overnight I'll be cooking a full English breakfast on his chest in the morning.

When the Abingdon Marathon was last run, in 2006, we were there. Leon had a place. I didn't. An autumn marathon wasn't on my agenda. I'd restarted training in June after a long gap enforced by domestic upheavals, and my target race was the Windsor half-marathon. Which is why, about six weeks before the race, I heard myself offering to relieve someone of an Abingdon race number that they didn't want.

My training went well. I got up to 50mpw for the first time ever, and didn't break down. I did everything right for Windsor, didn't have a particularly good race on the day, and still brought my PB down from a frustrating 2:00:47 to 1:47:54. Two weeks later, I did the Kenilworth half-marathon as a training run without any taper, and finished comfortably in 1:42:24. A few days later I did my only pre-Abingdon long training run - a 19-miler.

I was running faster and more consistently than I ever had before, and Leon offered to give up his chance of sub-3:15 to help me aim for sub-4. This would be an even bigger leap than I'd made at the half-marathon distance, since my marathon PB was 4:41:21.

We had company for the race. Valerie, also looking for sub-4, ran with us for the first 17 miles but then had to drop back a little. And early on, we were joined by a V70 gentleman who was aiming for the 5 hours he needed to qualify for Boston. "I'll stay with you for as long as I can keep up," he said. He stayed back with Valerie, then caught us up again a few miles later and went on to leave us to eat his dust. Respect :o)

I saw The Wall. I gently ploughed through it and, for the first time ever in a marathon, came out the other side running strongly again. That was an enduring lesson.

We finished in 3:54:49. I was delighted - and, physically, absolutely fine.

Next lesson. We went out for a late lunch with a group from Runner's World and Fetch, to which we'd just been introduced the previous evening. We found ourselves sitting beside the MV45 winner and another very fast male runner. This gave us an opportunity to observe what champion distance-runners regard as recovery-food. We were very pleased to note that instead of a protein shake and a handful of pills, they each had half a farmyard, fried, with chips, and washed down with a pint of beer. Anything green and leafy was left on the side of the plate.

If I could turn in that sort of marathon performance off half-marathon training, what could I achieve if I actually targeted a marathon? After five consecutive ballot rejections, I had a guaranteed FLM place for 2007 ... sub-3:45? Sub-3:30?

Pride goes before a fall, and that's a story for another time. But that Abingdon performance showed me that I could take control of a marathon instead of letting it happen to me :o)