What the difference a few days make. If I had written a entry in the middle of the week I would have reported how happy I was with the way my training was coming along. My mileage was heading back towards where it should be, around the 50 miles a week plus area and as an added bonus my times were starting to see an improvement as well. The midweek medium/long run was starting to develop, this week was 10 miles in the next month or so I hope to build this up to half marathon distance. My training was leaving me tired but it was a happy kind of tired with the knowledge that everything was coming together.

So what has changed? The dreaded lurgy has attacked. I awoke this morning with a sore throat and a blocked up nose. Being ill is not something that I do that well, I get too restless to be able to just take it easy and let my body recover. Then I will start thinking have I pushed myself too hard over the last week or so, I have increased the pace after all, and therefore brought the cold upon myself? Maybe, but its more likely because my wife has had a cold all week, I live in a country were minus temperatures are the norm and instead of a nice cosy office I work in a constant 4 degrees warehouse.

So I just have to accept it. I will probably end up loading myself full of fruit this week and multi vitamin drinks to try and help the bugs on there way. I will try and keep the routine up in the coming months as well to try and keep on the right side of the healthy/ill line. If I can keep it up who knows, until recently fruit and myself were usual companions, but it has to be better than being ill.

In reality I guess its not that bad, all going well I should be shot of the sniffes in a few days. I will miss a long run, I had planned my second 20 miler this weekend, but I am ahead of schedule for this marathon so its bearable. It could have been worse a cold is much better than a injury. So no more feeling sorry for myself, I will be back out there running soon and on the right side at least it meant I had the time to blog!

A slightly lower mileage but at a faster pace this week. Good to get back into the swing of things after our hoilday but next week it back to buisness once again and proper training will resume.

Day	Distance	Time / pace info	Comment
Monday	Rest Day		Cross training - Well a day of shopping anyway
Tuesday	Rest Day		Travel day - Returning to Sweden with a 3am start meant I was too tired to run once we had arrived back home
Wednesday	10.9 km	53.07 - 4:52 per km	Pushing the pace a little - probably the guilt from not having run for a while.
Thursday	10.9	1:02.39 - 5:45 per km	Easy day, much slower regreting the day befores pace
Friday	Rest Day	59:26 - 5:27 per Km
Saturday	10.91 km	50:55 - 4:40 per Km	Much faster than my regular runs - I think having the mp3 player on resulted in me running a faster pace to match the beat, or it might have been the return of snow meant i felt safer running than on ice. I was trying to push the pace again but i didnt think i was pushing as much as it turned out.
Sunday	21.4 kms	1.46:36 - 4:58 per km	More of a medium sized run this week than a long one. Felt good and didnt noticed the legs being tired from the day before which was good.
Weekly Total	54.2 kms	This Years total Kms: - 161

You may have noticed that my blogging has been slightly limited this week. That could either mean one of two things. I might be out running so much that I have little time left over to actually write about it. Or I could be feeling too drained, not doing that much running and therefore feel too guilty to show my face on here. Sadly the truth is the second choice.

After being able to sleep in last week while back in England you would have thought I would be back refreshed and ready to attack my training again. I probably would have been expect for having to get up at 3am for the flight back to Sweden. A sensible person would have gone to bed in good time but am I a sensible person? Gess I am training for a marathon in a Swedish winter so we can scrub logical from my list of personality traits.

I have managed a couple of runs, both on my 10.9km course. A tempo run of just over 53 minutes on Wednesday and then a recovery run the day after 10 minutes slower with my legs regretting the tempo run. So not much to write home about this week but then there are still two days left to make amends, a weekend free from work and a fresh start next week where I can hopefully get myself back on track.

I managed a second run between dragged around the shops during our trip to England. 69 minutes around the winding country lanes taking my total for the last seven days to just under 2 hours. Not the best of weeks but during several months worth of training it is likely that these things will happen. So my running totals were down but that doesn't mean I didn't manage to achieve some cross training.

There is a thread on the runnersworld forum at the moment rather bizarrely asking if its okay to run with a Swede stuffed down your lyrca shorts? The generally consensus was that it was fine as long as you asked first. Taking a Swede shopping however is not such a good idea. I had to check each day to make sure my wife hadn't been taking my sports drinks before each days outing but it seemed to pure a case of pure naturally ability to shop. Maybe I can log it as endurance training?

Our trip has also brought a new found respect for all of you training in England during the winter. So you don't have the levels of snow or ice that we should have at this time of year but you also seem to be lacking in other departments as well. Street lighting. Maybe I have been spoilt over here. Maybe I am expecting to much from a village, admittedly a large village but still a village. A set of distant glows on the horizon isn't what I have become used to.

Then there are the roads themselves with all the crazy drivers to be found upon them. Narrow little twisty country road with rally drivers tracing along them. We have a special phrase for streches of tarmac like these in Sweden, we call them cycle paths. No matter how erratic your running style becomes you know your greatest danger is that you might just hear a cyclist tutting as they pedal off into the distances. How do you manage to piece together a long run in England avoiding too many hills, mad cyclists, in places where you can actually see where you are going and still run the distance that you had planed? Your all amazing, keep it up, you deserve my awe...

Marathon training is again taking a backseat as we visit family back in old Blighty. I managed to get a quick 37 mins running in this morning but it wont be much more than that I shouldnt think. I now know that my long run on Sunday was done too fast. It didnt feel bad at the time but it took a couple of days to get back to normal again. I needed to get some extra sleep but didnt actually get any so I ended up feeling pretty drained. We live and learn.

My target time is in doubt again. Just what should I be aiming for? A few people have been leaving comments saying that I am doing so well to have my long run up to the distance that I do so early on in my training. Well maybe, but the real reason is the Swedish winter, Snow and ice wouldn't have made for very interesting 20 milers come February. They might have even have been impossible. Best to get the long runs in early and hope to hang on to as much fitness as I could while the Swedish winter had its fun.

That would have been all well and good any other year but not 2005. Has anyone seen a Swedish winter wandering around looking lost as it certainly isn't here. There should be piles of snow lining the roads and a cm or two of crunch beneath your feet on the paths. Not a bit of it. A few piles that have been bullbozed here and there but not much else. So there's a cling film layer of ice most of the time but then threes the gravel that has been put down to provide grip. So there's n real problem there and together with the icebugs it seems to be full steam ahead towards London. I am going to be able to get in much more training than I ever thought possible.

Then on Sunday I ran my first 20 miler. I had run the entire route before as I had added together sections of my regular loops to form one long run. I hadn't however run them in the order I did on Sunday so I was able to judge my pace by regular landmarks and make adjustments as necessary. I didn't think I was pushing that hard, just concentrating on getting the section that I was on at that moment completed and hoping that the extra distance at the end wouldn't be too painful. My only real aim was to make it around. So why, or maybe the real question is how, did I end up running at the same pace I would have for a 10km run? And seeing as it really wasn't
that bad at the end, how much longer could I have kept the same pace for?

Even though its totally irrelevant I plugged the data into a race predictor. Based on the 20 miles run with a 5 percent allowance for slowing on the final 6 miles I should be able to come home in just under 4 hours. If I "could" do that now a sub 3:45 in April looks a rather weak target. Maybe a 3:30 is a better aim? On the other hand I don't want to start out to hard in April and end up missing the lesser target of 3:45 as well.

Its probably far too early to be thinking about race day pace anyway at the moment. Not worth getting anyones nickers in a twist over. Something to mull over and at least the dilemma is because I am considering that I might be able to achieve more than I had rather than the depressing thought of being slower. The end of March will be the time for the real decisions but that I don't suppose that will stop me pondering over them now all the same.

Rich posted a comment on yesterdays post which made me realise I have not included much details of my training over recent days. So to make amens and "prove" that I havent been a lazy boy below is an extract from last weeks training log.

Day	Distance	Time / pace info	Comment
Monday	10.9 Kms	56:15 - 5.09 per km	Standard route but a little faster than usual, felt good
Tuesday	10.9kms	53:03 - 4.52/ per km	Pushing the pace, closest I can get to speedwork while there is still ice around.
Wednesday	7km	42:00	Disaster - should have been the same route as earlier in the week, but calls of nature put a early stop to this run. You dont really want details!
Thursday	0	:	Rest day
Friday	10.9km	59:26 - 5:27 per Km	Easy paced run
Saturday	5 km	26:15 - 5:13 per Km	Was meant to be another speed session, wrong choice of shoes on a new route meant a section of bambi on ice moments
Sunday	32 kms	2.56:46 - 5:34 per km	My first attempt at a 20 mile training run, didnt realise i was running at the pace I was, wasnt the best of weather but nothing seemed to be a problem, the last kilometer was that tough either - very odd!
Weekly Total	76.6 kms	This Years total Kms: - 87

If you say the world London marathon to a non runner, the first two questions they will ask is "how far is that then?" followed by "Which charity are you running for?" For me its a personal challenge to met the goals I have set myself rather than an event to use to raise money. However if money can be raised for a good cause while meeting the goals laid down then that cannot be a bad thing.

I have my own place rather than a golden bond entry that ties to a certain charity and an amount of money that has to be raised so I have the full quota of charities to choose from. I had decided who I would run for before the events in Asia but had not commit myself to anything. To stick to my earlier decision or to change to a cause supporting those in need after the tsunami.

After giving it some thought I have chosen to stick to my guns and run for the Halo Trust. There is no denying the horrendous scale of the disaster in Asia but does that make the needs of other charities less? In reality it probably makes them greater as donations are diverted away to those in need after the tsunami.

The Halo Trust works removing landmines and is the charity that Chris Moon was working for when he lost two limbs. They have a simple philosophy, If its in the ground get it out. They don't work raising public awareness or get distracted by involvement in campaigns and conferences. While it might be argued that they would raise more if they did it has the very positive effect that you can be assured as large a percentage of funds donated actually go towards the charity's main aim.

If you would like to contribute to my marathon fundraising you can do so by following this link. If you would like to support the cause but do not have the monetary means to do so you might wish to consider clicking on an advert provided my google on the right hand side. A small amount is paid by google for each link followed and the total raised by this means will also be donated to halo in April.

Oh and in answer to the other question, its 26.2 miles and don't you forget the point 2!

I keep my old race medals in a jar tucked away in a cupboard. From small local races to marathons that's where they stay. To the causal observer they are nothing more than a tacky souvenir. The running equivalent of taking a trip to London and coming back with a small plastic figure dressed up as a guard of Buckingham Palace.

However each piece of metal has its own story. Whether its a new personal best, a new distance attempted for the first time or the time that everything that could have gone wrong did. Contained in that jar is a timeline of my progress. There are times when I start to take the medals for granted but when my wife starts showing them to guest with pride I remember why I have keep them.

Recently I have been looking on ebay to see if I could pick up one of the rain jackets sent to those unlucky in the ballot. So far There hasn't been one of the right size for me but if I had so wished my medal collection could have grown dramatically. It doesn't surprise me that people might want to sell their old medals, I haven't so many at present so each one has quite a high value to me personally, but after a long running career who knows?

But who buys these medals? There doesn't seem to be a shortage of bidders. Maybe a few are collectors of marathon memorabilia? Are there such people? Or are these people who want to say they have run the marathon and blag about it without having to run a single mile? I wonder what times they say they finished in. What stories of pain they come up with. Do they say they had to put month upon month of training in or do they pretend that they were so super human and did it on next to no training what so ever and still made it around all the same. Who knows, but at the end of the day its still them that are missing out.

Happy New Year everyone! 2005 has arrived and brought with it a blank training log and the chance to start afresh with new goals to aim for and the feeling that the marathon is getting even closer. Its this year now after all.

So what are my targets for this year? Before I can set out this years targets I have to explain that my overall target is to be able to run a marathon in less than 3 hours. That would mean I would have a time which qualified for a "Good for age" place for future London Marathons and wouldn't have to worry if I could obtain a start place via the ballot for 2 years at least.

When would I like to have run my sub 3 marathon by? Well apart from the obvious as soon as possible, I have set myself a deadline of before I am 30. No real reason other than its a round number and it should be achievable. It also gives me 3 years to complete the task. With all those 3 in there someone ought to be able to come up with a cacthy phrase or pun, but I cant seem to

So coming back to my targets for this year. So far I have been rather coy about saying what time I am hoping for at London. Well I will come clean and say that I would like it to be sub 3hours 45 minutes. Given my time at shorter distances I believe I can do this as long as I can manage enough long runs during the rest of my training.

Targets for 2005

Marathon - sub 3.45:00
Half Marathon - 1.30:00
10km - sub 39:00
Other - To be able to touch my toes
Other - 1500 miles to be run in training

Now watch as I fail miserably to reach each and everyone one of these!