Now that training is taking up most of his personal (and even some of his professional) time, Emmet Malone finds that taking a break can be costly
As any of you actually preparing to do one will already have discovered, training for a marathon effectively fills in most of the gaps in your week. Then, though you will be less aware of this, there's writing about training for a marathon, which just about takes care of any fleeting moments of potential leisure time that might have crept through the cracks.
I mention this only by way of explanation for the fact that when I had to visit Liverpool recently in the course of my real job here at The Irish Times (writing about football) and ended up flying back through Manchester, I sort of felt compelled to use some of the time available in the afternoon to drop into a city centre running shop.
It was only the second shop devoted 100 per cent to the sport that I'd ever been in, after an impressive basement operation in Boston where a picture of John Treacy took pride of place on the wall.
Anyway, despite being busy, the staff were friendly and helpful and so, after skulking about the place for a bit and asking lots of questions, I felt bad about leaving without buying something.
Not wanting to go too crazy on the basis of politeness, though, I bought three packs of energy gel and a deodorant stick-style pack of what is effectively grease intended to prevent chafing by shorts and shirts. With my inner thighs and nipples showing serious signs of wear, this stuff has become needed as my recent training runs have reached the mid teens of miles.
What I didn't allow for, through all of this, were the new restrictions on liquids on flights. Moments before reaching security at Manchester Airport I cottoned on to the fact that the gels might be an issue and got them into a transparent bag. Oddly, I suppose, neither the lubricant stick nor the tin of coffee I had purchased struck me as a problem. Predictably, I was hauled over to have my bag searched.
The security man was very pleasant about the whole thing and didn't even insist on taking the coffee, which had been the item to show up on the x-ray. He asked if there was anything else that I might need to have looked at and before I could answer, produced the brightly coloured package of my newly acquired Glide. There was the briefest of pauses, during which I can only presume he was considering the conversation he might be about to have with me and then he threw the stuff into the bag and, rather hastily, wished me a pleasant journey.
Well, I took myself and my Glide off to the Phoenix Park on Saturday for the second of the Adidas race series, the Frank Duffy 10-mile run. Loughrea's Gerry Ryan again won the men's event and, due to his age profile, deprived me in the over 40s section along the way. Well, he was the first of many to come between that particular title and me.
Fortunately, I'd set my targets a little lower. In the wake of the five-mile race a few weeks back, a friend had pointed me in the direction of the website, mcmillanrunning.com where, using the running calculator put together by proprietor Greg McMillan, you can feed in a time you've run for any race and it will spew out a list of times you should be able to achieve for everything from 100 metres to a marathon.
According to Greg, my 38:50 a month ago set me on course for around three hours 50 minutes come late October. It also indicated that I had a 1:21:34 race in me on Saturday, which is somewhat better than the 1:24:15 I achieved.
Last week's training went reasonably well and while I haven't had time to get the physio sessions I still need to sort out a minor hamstring problem, that hasn't really hampered me too much.
Things started to go wrong, however, the night before, when my wife, Grainne, and I managed to sit up until 2.30am drinking two bottles of wine. Grainne, incidentally, spent the latter part of the evening laughing about the fact that I had to be up in a few hours to run 10 miles.
For my part, I was thinking back to 1991 and the World Student Games in Sheffield, where I was fortunate enough to witness Sonia O'Sullivan and Niall Bruton win one 1,500 metres final after the other and ended up going for a drink that night with Bruton and another well-known member of the Irish team, Noel Berkeley, who went on to become, amongst other things, Irish 10,000 metre champion.
To my amazement, it turned out that the pair had been out for a couple of drinks the night before as well, after which, Bruton had got up, headed down to the Ponds Forge stadium, and beaten a decent field to the gold medal.
Heading up the hill past the gate of the Cheshire Home on Saturday morning while in some distress, I realised that sometimes, it really is better not to listen to the professionals.
u Comments or queries can be sent to marathon@irish-times.ie
Since embarking on a campaign to run my first marathon, I assumed that most other participants had been inspired either while watching a race in person or by the heroics of one of the event's greats on television.
I've since come to realise that many people have, in fact, been influenced by the achievements of parents, mostly ordinary recreational runners, who completed the distance in the running boom of the early 1980s.
Well, nobody in my family ever ran and while I vividly remember the excitement of John Treacy winning silver at the Los Angeles Olympics and being overawed by a documentary on Czechoslovakian athlete Emil Zatopek, neither got me into running.
In fact, it was a close friend, Tom Duke, with almost no history in physical exercise that persuaded me that I could run 26.2 miles.
I'd known Tom about 20 years when he revealed one night in the pub that he was going to train for, and run, the Dublin marathon. For all my amusement, though, Tom was quietly determined. Though he readily conceded he could not at the time run more than a few metres without being exhausted, he insisted that he would do the training required and complete the race.
His only problem was, he said, that in order to follow the 16-week plan he had obtained in The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer, he would have to take his gear on holidays and start training during the third week of a three-week trip to the United States. Why, I cleverly suggested, didn't he start before he left, to make such a dramatic undertaking a little easier? "Why would I do that?" he replied with bewilderment. "It's a 16-week plan."
Four years on, he has done two Dublin marathons and is currently back in training, this time with wife Fiona, for number three.
My daughter Kate and I fed him Jaffa Cakes on Sarsfield Road, in Inchicore, during his first outing.
Now, he's a pretty big part of the reason I intend to be out there myself in 10 weeks' time. And yes, you've guessed it, he's six weeks into his training for this year's race, having started again from scratch.