I've made a start

I'm officially part of the ChildLine team now, so my JustGiving account is working, and I've made a start on figuring out how I'm going to get around this course.  Thanks to those who have sponsored me already - it is really appreciated!

The event is about 7 months away, which seems like plenty of time, but it soon passes and I don't want to be on the starting line wishing that I'd done more to prepare.

I need to figure out a training programme.  I'm starting from an 'OK' level of fitness, but that isn't going to be good enough to get around this course.  I've looked at gadgets in the past that monitor heartrate and distance travelled etc, on training routes.  Something like this has been recommended to me by a few people, so I will look at these again.  It is possible to integrate these devices with sites such as http://www.runsaturday.com/ which record the data and are great motivators for tracking and improving fitness over time. 

I was chatting to my father in law over the weekend who was a keen marathon runner in his time.  He was saying that he was doing 70 miles a week whilst training for his events!  To be totally honest, this is out of my reach.  I'm going for more like 30-40 miles a week, and building up to that fairly gradually.  We'll see how I get on, but some training guides I've seen on the Internet suggest 30-40 miles as acceptable for someone who wants to get around the course.

I've also been looking at training routes from my house.  The 3 half marathons I've done in the past have all been the Torbay Half Marathon.  I live quite close to this route, and most of my road running has been done on this route.  However, as I'm going to need to start upping the amount of runs I go out on, I could do with saving the 40-50min round trip to get to the Torbay Half Marathon course.  I've been looking at things like http://www.mapmyrun.com to find suitable routes, of different distances, from my house.

Finally, today I went for a small road run today and did 4.5miles in about 45mins.  It was my first road run since this years Torbay Half Marathon in June, and it wasn't too bad.  At least I can say I've made a start this week, but I'm not underestimating the amount of work I have to do!