I was happy just being a runner. I started running about 15 years ago - I was an average inactive IT worker, desk bound. The most physical activity I had was lifting a server into a data centre rack. But I was fascinated by long distance runners and one day in the pub the London Marathon was on and I bet a work colleague that a year later I would run it.
I started from a zero base. I've read books by people who say 'oh I started in triathlon from nothing' then you read on and you find out they rowed competitively for 10 years, or they were school swim team champions. I played some rugby union when I was about 14, a bit of football (soccer) around the same age, that's it. We did have cross country running at school but I hated it and mainly finished last. I started smoking when I started work at 17, then became asthmatic after an accident involving a chest trauma when I was in my late twenties.
So running was tough. I started by running around the park near where I lived in Epsom, in the south of the UK. The park was roughly square so I ran one length, walked the next to recover, rinse and repeat. It started that simply, and I just built from there. I think I was reading Runner's World magazine and picked a 10K training plan, and eventually I ran a 10K in December 2002, finishing in 52 minutes (this was the Leeds Abbey Dash, and in researching this article I see it's still going).
It was a real buzz to be in a race with thousands of other people, and yet a lot of the appeal of running is the solitude. I found running to be a great time to think, I would play conversations back in my head, solve work problems and personal ones, just.. think. This is something that has continued until now - I still prefer to train alone and am not a member of any clubs. This is something that may have to change but I'll talk about that another time.
So I continued, doing the Brass Money half marathon in late January 2003 in a time of 1:55. (I keep a spreadsheet of my results - it's few months out of date but is here. Then I did another half in March 2003 and shock! I was slower. It was the first time I had gone backwards, and the first time I found temperature an issue - it was unseasonably warm for March and I suffered in the heat. But I had a goal - I was going to run a sub-four hour marathon.
I remember I applied for the London Marathon but it was so oversubscribed places were allocated via a ballot and I didn't get in. So I entered the Shakespeare Marathon, taking place in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 2003. It was a pretty place to start a race, with part of the course running along a long straight track that had been a railway line before it had been closed and the tracks ripped up. I don't remember much else about the race but there must have been a fair amount of walking involved as I finished in 4h40m, a long way off my goal. I do remember eating two huge ham and cheese rolls at the finish line.
Fast forward to 2005 and I had moved to Australia. I had also taken up drinking more and smoking again. I was sharing a unit in central Sydney with a couple of active people who convinced me to enter the Sydney Morning Herald half marathon, I ran about 500m before starting to walk and ran/walked the rest of the way to a 2h25m finish. I remember celebrating with a beer and cigarette on the unit balcony within 30 minutes of finishing, and it was another 2 years until I did another race, the SMH Half again, 2h15m. I was motivated again to go for the 4 hour marathon so kept up the training and racing, getting faster, attempting another full marathon in September 2008 but wilting in the heat of a 30+ degree centrigrade day and finishing in 4h20m.
In 2009 I finally did it - a 1h53m half marathon in May followed by a 3h53m full marathon in September. I remember it being fairly comfortable, of knowing I would need a bathroom stop at about half marathon distance so speeding up from 10km to 20km so I had enough of a time buffer to stop. I reeled off a long sequence of sub-5m30 kilometres and had enough time in the bag for some walk breaks after 35k. Through the wonders of online logging you can see my race splits here.
So that was that goal done. But go back to 2007. After doing a half marathon that year my brother in law said he was doing a triathlon and maybe I should do one of them too..?
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