I'm only a month and a half late with this, but as they say, "better late than never" 🙂

So how was 2013 for me in terms of running? Absolutely bloody brilliant in the end.

Training

I started the year off a little slowly. The weather wasn't very good and I wasn't particularly motivated after working the Christmas period having gotten back from visiting family in South Africa. What training I was doing was mostly the MAF approach with one session of Yasso 800s a week thrown in... the idea was to try and get a bit more speed in my legs in preparation for my first marathon in nearly 10 years. This served me well, or so I thought. Blowing up spectacularly in the Milton Keynes marathon proved there was no way I was going to get under three hours on MAF alone... I needed more tough workouts that would teach me to run quicker and longer on tired legs. So I did a bit of research and discovered the Hanson Marathon Method. This struck a chord with me so I bought the book and I switched to the advanced programme of the Hanson Marathon Method and this proved to be a brilliant programme for me. My mileage increased, my training more consistent and more importantly tougher and more specific to the demands of racing a sub-3 hour marathon.

All this marathon specific training also saw me tick off the most kilometres of running in a year ever of 3236km with 5 months topping 300km of which September was the highest at a whopping 383km.

Races

As you can expect all that training paid off and paid off brilliantly in all distances that I raced. I set new lifetime personal bests in all distances I raced and in some of them by a large margin over the year before.

Check out my Goals page for my personal bests as they now stand.

Diet

I stuck with the paleo-lite/low-carb-high-fat (LCHF) diet as it is proving to work so well for my running and general health and energy levels. I've not been 100% strict, but pretty consistent and I think its this consistency that has allowed me to adapt and take full advantage of all those fat calories.

On to 2014

So what's on the cards for 2014?

  • More training as I've entered three marathons spread across the year with the goal of dipping under 2:50 in the third Unfortunately, the training is on a bit of a go-slow as I write this as I've developed a suspected stress fracture in my right ankle which I'm putting down to literally hitting the track too hard: I think I went into track sessions with a little too much gusto.
  • More marathons: you've got to do them to become good at them.
  • More strength training.
  • My 50 parkruns T-shirt.
  • Stick with the LCHF diet and try and reduce the amount of beer I drink - this is my one "sin" under the LCHF diet.
  • Set new personal bests in all distances.

Things started off so well this year before I hurt my ankle so here's to hoping it heals quickly and I can get back onto the road and back up to my desired and required training volume soon.