Half Marathon a Month Challenge - January 2016 #25

I've decided to now do the Half Marathon a Month Challenge posts on a monthly event basis, rather than in quarters as I'd  been doing them before. Hopefully this means that they will be fresher after the event. Of course it will take a while for them to get up to date as I am 7 months behind! I'd better start catching up quickly. Here we go then with month #25 in January 2016.

(I've also changed the format a wee bit, with results coming after the narrative)

Central Lancashire Half Marathon - 3rd January 2016

In 2014 and 2015 Chris and I had to create our own home cooked half marathons for January as there were no official events available to us at a reasonable distance from central Scotland. However, in 2016 we had a feasible event option when I saw that the Central Lancashire Half Marathon was taking place in Preston on 3rd January. I easily persuaded Chris that it be a worthwhile trip.

Alas, when the time arrived to travel down to Preston, I was still severely incapacitated with my knee injury (see Q4 2015 blog post). Although I had managed to scrape through a half marathon 3 weeks earlier with the same injury, the fact that it was our annual December pub crawl event, and therefore involved beers en route, helped me enormously.

So, I reluctantly made a tactical withdrawal from the Central Lancashire event but I still travelled with Chris down to Preston to provide both moral and practical support, and to enjoy the good swally that is now a traditional part of these trips.

We left Glasgow on Saturday 2nd January, and although we had booked train tickets straight through to Preston, the recent bad weather had damaged a bridge on the West Coast Line and we had to use the bus replacement service. (Shouldn't it be called a train replacement service? #hmhb)

We boarded the bus with trepidation, but in fact the journey was ok and it's just as easy to take a libation on the bus as it is on the train, despite the toilets being smaller and bit smellier.

After alighting the bus at Carlisle, we made the shortish journey to Preston by train, checked in to our hotel and headed out for a carb loading curry at the excellent EastZEast. This was followed by a few beers at some of the less salubrious (and a wee bit scary) establishments nearby.

In the morning we headed to the event venue, which was in Lea Town, just outside Preston. It was a very cold day as you would expect but Chris unusually decided to go out with only one layer. (I've seen this guy run in the summer with a sweatshirt on!) 

He did say after the race that it was the coldest he had ever felt during a run.

Anyway, despite all the circumstances, Chris finished in a very reasonable time, as captured in this video!

Result:  02:03:33

Well, that was Chris sorted, but I still had to run a half marathon at some point in January to keep our Half Marathon a Month Challenge continuity. It was always going to be a home cooked half marathon for me, but when would I be fit enough to run it, and where would it be?

Eastwood Loop - 31st January 2016

I spent the rest of January attending the Physio and acting on his advice on how to improve the injury.*

*Basically this involved lots of strength work on quads and hamstrings. As it usually does!

I was steadily making progress throughout the month, but I was effectively still injured when 31st January arrived and I was sitting on the sofa watching a La Liga game on the telly. It looked as if the HMAMC (for me) was going to stop at 24 months.

But it was only 6pm, and even though I hadn't been doing any notable cardio training for 7 weeks, I just couldn't contemplate waking up on 1st February having broken the HMAMC chain. I was determined to run 21.1 km (13.1 miles) right then, but what would the route be? Believe it or not, even in a large conurbation, it can be difficult to find 21.1km of contiguous and runnable kilometres.

It's time to introduce you to the 'Eastwood Loop'...

If I start running north from outside the house and follow the roads in a loop back to where I started, it goes something like this...

1km - The wee newsagent that sells Newland's rolls and has a Post Office
 
2km - Sainsbury's at Muirend
 
3km - The GHA Rugby Club
 
4km - Giffnock Polis Station
 
5km - Eastwood Toll
 
6km - Williamwood Railway Station
 
7.37km - Back to where I started!

Now the extra 0.37km is very important as it means that running around this loop 3 times is almost exactly a half marathon! How serendipitous is that?!!

Just an aside on the name, 'Eastwood Loop'. I've made that up because I had to label it for this post. It is a very popular running route. It wouldn't surprise me if 100s of runners do what is generically known as 'the loop' every week, from various starting points. However, as it takes in 3 different parts of Eastwood (Clarkston, Netherlee, and Giffnock), and only skims the city of Glasgow at Muirend, I reckon Eastwood Loop is a good name for it.

So, on a cold, windy and wet night I, unusually for me, put on 2 layers of running gear and headed out to do the loop 3 times. I already knew that due to the injury and lack of fitness it would require a combination of running and walking if I was actually going to complete it.

I set off, and unsurprisingly it was a struggle. I just kept my head down and ploughed on, and I got an nice surprise after I had completed 2 loops when my daughter Scarlett joined me for the last third of the run!

Here's a photo of us both after we finished. Suitably weather beaten!

Time: 02:50:10

So, it wasn't a great time by any manner of means, but the distance was completed, the January 2016 box had been ticked, and the HMAMC had now reached an unbroken 25 months for both Chris and me.