Can't say I'm not disappointed in my time: 3:32:50, my 3rd-slowest marathon all-time (out of nine), and just one second faster than my Kent Roadrunner performance last June. Still, I finished, and a lot about it went right. I think I would have been six or seven minutes faster if it weren't for the calf cramps. Same thing that has happened before, especially at Luton 2009 and London 2012 (and I think to a lesser extent at Kent 2013): spasms in my right calf. They hit early, the first twitch around mile 17, forced me to slow down and be cautious. Miles 23 and 24 were really slow because I kept having to stop and walk. At one point a physiotherapist was massaging my calf on the sidelines. She was a nice lady and we had a good little conversation. I was convinced at the time that my cramping was due to all the sugar I'd been consuming along the route: tangfastics, gels, Lucozade, a banana, etc. I had decided that I should drink as much water as possible to dilute these effects. She suggested the same thing. I have no idea if we were correct or not but I did consume a lot of water in the last several miles, and by mile 25 or so the cramping was gone. I ran my last 1/2 mile at a 6:45 pace, my best of the race, which shows that I had a lot of energy left that the cramping had been preventing me from using. I must have passed 500 people in the last mile.
So here's what I've learned and what my plan is going forward. First, next race, I won't eat a lot of sugar during the race. I never eat or drink anything on training runs and I don't need it. Second, I'll try and get my mileage back up closer to where it used to be. My average weekly mileage in the 25 weeks leading up to this race was only about 22 miles. That includes four weeks essentially lost to injury; without those my AWM would have been close to 26 miles. What I need to try and do is get my AWM up to around 30, and to do that I need to avoid injury. I'm hoping that I can avoid injury by continuing with my shoe rotation plan, maintaining a collection of many different kinds of minimalist shoes and cycling through them.
Maybe a reasonable goal for Abingdon in six months would be 3:20, and then aim for 3:15 at London in a year.
