Attention turns to the Glasgow to Edinburgh double marathon

A week on from the D33 ultra the legs appear to be in decent working order. I had a few good tempo runs in the week and today I went out for a test run of my Glasgow to Edinburgh strategy. The race is 55 miles alongside the canals between Scotland’s two largest cities.

It requires the runner to carry some mandatory kit – among the list is waterproof jacket, headtorch (w. spare batteries) and a space blanket – so whilst as a runner you like to be as light as possible, there is still a need to carry some gear.

The picture above shows me with a bag on, and not a bra as some people have jokingly (I hope) commented on Facebook earlier. It contained all the mandatory kit and I put some food in there for added weight effect to replicate the race day conditions. Albeit it wasn’t exactly a stone o’ tatties I was carrying.

My strategy for G2E is to run 25 walk 5. I did this at the JLM50 last year and it went extremely well. However, I am, foolishly perhaps, going to attempt to do it a touch quicker than I did in Strathaven. I averaged about 9:14 mins per mile at the John Lucas. At G2E I am looking to run 8 min miles and the walks will take me around an average of 8:30 per mile. That would be good enough to beat 8 hours, but that is a big ask. There will be a lot of ebbing and flowing on the day.

Today I did 18 miles in 2 hours 30 minutes, not blistering pace but rather steady eddie. I will have 37 more to do in a few weeks and felt pretty fresh at the end of today’s run. But that is all about managing effort.

The picture above shows how this looks from an average pace point of view. Interestingly, the battery on my Garmin was dead this morning so I used the Strava mobile app which meant I only got updates on the miles, not continually as I would normally do, and interestingly appeared to manage in the 7:40-8:00 range pretty well. In fact, only in the 16th and 17th miles did I get out of the zone and that is because I got to do a big hill near Castlecary and just, to be honest, was getting bored so decided to up the pace.

Overall, I expect to be about 7 miles per hour in the race but genuinely don’t know how the latter stages will look and feel like. As with D33 it will be all about steady pace and trying to get to the end in good condition, finishing strong and hopefully breaking 8 hours. That would close to the same placing as I managed at D33 which would be a pretty decent result for me.

For now, training is going well, D33 was a real boon and I am looking forward easing into the next couple of weeks and enjoying my first tilt at a new race, for me at least.

Below are a couple of photos from today’s jaunt. It was a beautiful day and the canal towpaths can been blissful yet busy on such days, I hope we see the same kind of colours in the skies on 5th April.