4/22/10

Thursday’s Training – Am: 48 mins with 6*1 min hard, 1 min easy

Mileage – 7 Miles

I woke up at 6am this morning and headed down to the restaurant to get a coffee and croissant before heading out for my run. I relaxed in my room for a while and was glad to see that the weather was going to be nice. I had been told by some of the marathon staff that there was a park a couple of miles away so I made an attempt at finding it. I missed Jamaica road somehow and headed down a different street and winded my way through all the streets until I found it and suddenly I was at the park. As I ran around, I was amazed to see a disused track fenced up beside a sports centre. It’s a shame to see a perfectly good track just sitting there and unable to be used. I found a good stretch of flat path and did my mini fartlek on it so that I could get my legs moving a bit. I felt pretty good and was running pretty fast so hopefully come race day, I can do the same. After I was finished, I jogged back to the hotel and stretched for a little while before showering and heading down to breakfast.

I was disappointed to see that no porridge was available but I am going to ask if they can get some for race day. I headed up to the athlete lounge to se if I could get on the computers and I found James Thie (former international athlete and working for the marathon this weekend), Dan Robinson and our pace maker, Mike Morgan from the USA. We sat and chatted for a little white but I got up at 10.30am as I was scheduled to get a massage in the next room. The massage was great and just what I needed before the busy day ahead. Once I was finished it was straight off to do some press photos and some TV interviews outside of the hotel with the Tower bridge in the background. After about half an hour of doing that, we headed back inside and then Dan and I had our press conference. It was fairly straight forward and there were no questions that stumped me. I also managed to avoid telling anyone my time goals for the race, which seem to be the question that everyone kept bringing up. Dan and I then had one on one interviews with the respective papers and then again we headed outside for some more BBC TV interviews. This all went onto about 1.30pm so it was good timing as I was meeting one of the Mizuno media reps to head over and do some work at the marathon expo. I quickly went upstairs and got changed into my race gear and after grabbing a sandwich and coffee we headed off to the DLR train.

One of the many photo's from todays press work

The expo looked great and I immediately saw my old housemate from Florida, Mark Buckingham who was working at the Timex stand. I had a quick word but promised I would head back later and catch up with him. The Mizuno stand was really nice and I had a quick peek at all the shoes they had out as I haven’t tried out a lot of the range that they have. I spent the next hour or so doing interviews with various magazines, newspapers, radio and TV channels and then finally got to see the Online Precision Fit system that Mizuno have come up with. Its basically site where you can go and answer a bunch of questions about your weight, body type, foot strike, leg movement and flexibility and it will narrow down the shoes that would be good for you. This saves a lot of time with having to deal with the wall of shoes that can be a bit daunting when entering a running store. The system chose for me the Wave Rider (which I already use) and the Wave Precision so I tried a pair on and they felt great. After having a bit of a jog on the treadmill with them, I fully agreed that the shoes were well suited to me. The Mizuno guys actually let me keep the shoes so I was really happy about that. I headed back to the Timex stand and had a good blether with Mark for a while before his boss offered me their new watch to use during the race. Again, I was happy to oblige and the watch turned out to be a really good one. It’s a tap screen so you just have to slap your wrist when you want to take a split. It will then tell you whether it’s faster or slower than the split that you will have programmed into the watch. It means that this will be perfect for Sunday as it will tell me exactly how much quicker or slower than my projected pace I am and I can (hopefully) make the appropriate pace changes. I decided to finally get off my feet and headed back to the hotel so I could relax for a while.

Not long after getting back, I got a call from one of my groomsmen, Andy Scott, who I went to school with. He lives in London so we decided to catch up and have dinner so he headed over to the hotel and we headed over to the Dickens Inn for some dinner. We both had some pizza and salad and chatted for quite a while and caught up on all our news. We left there around 9pm and walked back to the hotel where I bumped into some more friends. One of them was Ian Hornabrook who I also used to live with in Florida. I hadn’t seen him for 4 years so it was good to see him and we promised to catch up more after the race. Andy headed home and I headed to my room and talked to Julie for a while before watching some TV and heading to sleep around 11pm. I wasn’t as tired tonight so found it hard to sleep but even more annoying was that after sleeping for a couple of hours, I woke up from a dream and found my body was really hot. This made it very tough to get back to sleep but after wriggling about for 20 minutes or so, I managed to slip back into my much needed sleep.

Here were some of the interviews:

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