I’ve never understood why people choose to run on a treadmill? If you want to lose weight, there are plenty of places to run, outside in the fresh air.

Outside is free. Inside a gym costs money. Why do people choose a gym? I don’t get it? Is it because they are scared of the weather? Getting wet for example.

Let me tell you something you may find hard to believe. I run 6 days a week, sometimes twice a day, and I very rarely run in the rain. I live in England which is notorious for it’s regular rainfall, but I rarely get wet.

Always have a Plan B in your endeavours. This is a fall back position should your Plan A get into trouble. I have already written about New Year’s Resolutions and the reason you should embrace failure. If you have a Plan B already prepared, then there is no failure involved in your planning, you have merely switched goals and targets.

Running marathons is a mental, as well as a physical challenge, particularly after the 20 mile mark. In the last 6 miles of a marathon every fibre in your body is saying stop, stop, but you have to overcome those messages and stay focused on continuing your run.

It’s a strange feeling, but the Gloucester Marathon is the first marathon I haven’t got stressed about. I’m actually looking forward to it.   This Sunday 22nd April 2011, I shall line up with hundreds of other runners, knowing I will complete the marathon, the only question is what time?

Why aren’t I worried? Well for a start, this is my 18th marathon, so I think I know the ropes. Also I’m not even training for this one, my training is focused on the Brighton marathon which is 10th April 2011. Trevor from Spa Striders suggested Gloucester because he had a bad experience  in the Edindburgh marathon last year. Edinburgh is run in May and it was very hot, too hot to get a decent race time. 

Running marathons is hard, training for marathons is even harder, so putting the words ‘enjoy’ and ‘marathon’ together doesn’t make sense, it’s an oxymoron. Except it does make sense in one particular section of marathon training – the taper.

Three weeks before your marathon you should start resting. If you haven’t trained enough before this, I’m sorry it’s too late now. The best thing you can do is get plenty of rest, preserving your strength for the marathon race ordeal.

New runners who enter marathons make two basic mistakes, they;

1) Don’t train hard enough.

2) Don’t rest enough.

At the start of every year I see lots of new runners pounding the streets. Christmas and the New Year celebrations are out of the way, and many people are trying to lose weight by exercising.

The other group of new runners are those that have signed up to run a marathon in 2011. In the UK the traditional marathon season is Spring time with London and Brighton marathons in April, and Stratford upon Avon plus Edinburgh marathons in May. 

You can WIN a 5 mile race, even if you can’t run more than 100 yards without walking!…….. HOW? Simple, you enter a handicapped race.

This works by the organiser estimating each entrants finishing time. If you have to run, walk, run, walk for example, your 5 mile time may be 1 hour 15 minutes. A regular runner like myself can complete the course in 34 minutes. So in the race you would start off 41 minutes before me, and we would both approach the finishing line at the same time.

There are many unique aspects to running a marathon, one of them is that you don’t get a second chance.  After spending 4 to 6 months training to a peak for marathon race day, if anything goes wrong, with illness, injury, pacing, or you just have a bad day, that’s it – you can’t run it again.

It takes a month to recover from a marathon, then you need to rebuild your training to peak for another race. In practical terms that means 6 months later, so you can only race two fast marathons in a year. Many elite runnners only peak for one marathon every 12 months.

You can predict your marathon time based on how long it takes you to run 800 metres. Don’t believe it? The secret lies in ‘Yasso 800s’.

This year I discovered an amazing new marathon workout. Amazing, because it’s the simplest marathon workout you’ve ever heard. (And simplicity in marathon training, is much to be prized). Amazing, because I’m convinced it actually works.

Yasso 800s have been devised by Bart Yasso , race services manager at RUNNER’S WORLD magazine. Amby Burfoot, the Boston marathon champion, takes up the story….

3 hours 29 minutes isn’t the flight time to Paris, or the Eurostar journey time, it’s the time I intend to take running 26 miles and 385 yards in the Marathon.

I leave for Paris tomorrow, and at 8.45am on Sunday 11th April 2010, I will run the Paris Marathon.

I am writing this post to put further pressure on myself! I’m 55 years old and ’retired’ from marathon running 4 years ago. The only reason I am going to Paris is to help Lucy, a member of Spa Striders, to run under 3 hours 30 minutes.

Every Thursday I coach around 20 runners for speed sessions at the Leamington Spa Track. None of the group, (myself included), are track runners however, we are simply trying to improve our speed, in long distance races from 10k to a marathon.

One difficulty we have is relating distances like 200 metres or 400 metres to something we actually race. The only track distance that makes sense to us is the mile. Everyone knows that a 4 minute mile is fast, and distance runners always know their mile pace, for every race they enter.