6 weeks to go...

Until my first marathon. Surprisingly the training is going well, I've managed to crack out 20 miles on my little legs, and feeling optimistic!

However I'm one of those people, that doesn't like it when things are easy and I like to take the hard route, so never mind being my first marathon, I'm now setting myself a time goal to do it in.... Under 4 hours 30 minutes.

Doable? Not sure but I shall have a good crack at it!

Diet to pants
The main thing that will probably help me achieve this on top of my training is my diet. Surely as a personal trainer my diet is perfect...ish. maybe. not really. I eat LOTS. 80% of the time my diet is good, but I have a few slip ups that like anyone have now become a regular occurance. The occasional piece of cake, chocolate bar, biscuit here and there. Aswell as the alcohol.... WOOPS. My diet now resembles something more like this...

And this...

Guess what, I'm only human! So in order to get my time nice and speedy, I'm giving up alcohol and sugar once again! Similar to the no sugar experiment but not quite as restrictive, I can have sugary goods in the form of sports drinks and gels, aswell as a few bits of sweetner in my protein bars and shakes.

Generally the idea behind this is to get rid of the mentality of "I can eat whatever I want cause I'm going to burn it off" and back to "my body is a temple".

Pre 20 mile carb loading...

So tomorrow morning I shall be getting up at the crack of dawn to run 20 miles.... desperate times call for desperate measures. Usually on a long run day I complete it in the late afternoon/early evening and have chance to stuff my face before.

This early morning hefty mileage is new to me and I'm not the type of person to crack out a full english at 5am, so I decided to shovel it in today instead. I literally rocked it out on the carbs...

I thought I would give you all a little insight into what a typical day of my diet looks like prior to a hard training day. My Carb loading today entailed....

Breakfast
1 Medium Orange, Handful of Strawberries and Blueberries, Handful of Cashew Nuts, 2 slices of wholemeal toast with crunchy Peanut Butter and a Protein Shake.

Training: Gentle 4.5 mile run

Post Workout Snack
Muesli Bar

Lunch
2 Tiger Bread Buns with Cheese and salad and a portion of chunky oven chips

Snack
1 medium apple, 1 Nectarine and a toffee cake

Snack
Protein Bar

Dinner
Wholemeal Pasta with Blue Cheese, Broccoli and Peas (MASSIVE portion)

Snack
Greek Yoghurt with Honey and Banana

Sounds like a lot and surely I'm going to end up looking like this....

 The weight is literally dropping off me, so there's truth when they say eat more to loose weight guys (as long as you burn it off).

Another thing I NEVER thought would happen. I'm sick of the sight of food. When you spend most of the day shovelling it in, it gets very boring very fast. My last meal today resembled me looking more like this...

Eating my way to a marathon...

Like anything to do with fitness and good nutrition, there's no point in having one without the other. This is particularly the case when training for long endurance events like marathons, and a good diet is essential. Sure calorie wise, as race day approaches you can pretty much eat whatever you want as you will more than likely burn it off later. However, performance wise, living off chocolate and pizza isn't going to help get you over the finish line. Diet is key, making sure you load the right amount of carbs, get a good amount of protein, and replace all the minerals lost in sweat.

Here are a few of the things that have got me through the gruelling training so far...

Standard morning feast ie. Breakfast

Typical Luncheon (on days when I have time to prepare something)

A couple of good quality dinners....

A typical carb loading meal the day before a long run....

Snacks inbetween (courtesy of Jane Delphi!)

16 miles of hell summed into a few photos

I went on a run yesterday, the longest one to date, on my 8 week mission to a marathon and thought I would display the sheer agony of parts of the run via photo (was a bit tricky!)

Getting my game face on....

16 miles requires a few essentials...

The first hill (Matthew Bank)...

Nice long stretch along Great North Road...

Running with the cows in town moor...

Down into the city centre....

I made a friend on the tyne bridge...

Into Sandyford...

Snack time at the top of Shields Road...

Hills, hills and more hills...

Escaping down into the Dene for a while...

The hill of death out of the Dene (pictures don't do this beast justice)...

Through to Gosforth High Street, only a few miles to go!

Got a bit lost and ended up coming out from here...

Less than a mile to go...

Homeward bound....

Finished thanks to these little champs!

Racing to my first marathon

I’m never one to do things the sensible way, so when I slowly began to progress from my half marathon distance I decided that I would attempt to run a marathon while it was easy to train and adapt my body in such a way. I usually rush into things, with my head in the clouds and blag my way through but I decided that this time I wanted to do this properly and really enjoy the experience having trained properly. So one random day in April I signed up for the Brighton 2012 marathon, thoroughly satisfied that with a year to train I would be in tip top condition.

I started training hard and fast increasing my distance significantly past the 13 mile wall and found that I hit a new wall, 16 miles. Frustrated with myself and mentally never being able to push myself past this point I tried to understand why psychologically my body wouldn’t let me go further in this distance and over the past few weeks the realisation that my goal is too far away to make me push myself hard enough. 

So me being me and never doing things the normal way has signed up for a marathon. Fair enough I hear you say, surely you’ve got 12-16 weeks over the year that you set yourself to train, which is still more than enough time. Aha! Here is where the problem lies, as I only have 8 weeks….

Is it doable? I have no idea; the body can do strange and wonderful things when you really want it to. Will I get a good time? Probably not but I will be happy just to complete it! So for the next 8 weeks I will blog my very short but sweet journey to my very first marathon.

Wish me luck!

 (I might not win but I can dream big!)

9 Reasons why the gym doesn’t necessarily get you fit

1.     1. You end up spending up to the equivalent of a workout getting there! The majority of people live at least 5-10 minutes away from their chosen gym, total this up over the week and you get at least an hour’s wasted travel time that could have been spent running in the great outdoors.

2.        

      2. Are you sure you have an effective workout? 9 times out of 10 the people that I see in gyms, either do the same thing every time they go into the gym and without variety and a challenge you will hit a plateau and your workouts will have no effect, or have no game plan go in and just wing it. A lot of thought should go into your workouts, with a full body approach, challenges and progression in every session.

3.        

      3. I’m super fit I can run at 14km an hour on the treadmill….wrong. For all you gym cardio demons, get outside!!! When training outside you work twice as hard, particularly all you treadmill runners. With the right trainers to take away the impact on your joints, there’s no excuse. The treadmill does half the work for you, due to the pull back of the belt, not only meaning you burn less calories than the treadmill tells you, but also putting you at risk of injury due to muscles imbalances particularly in the quads.

4.        

      4. It’s a waiting game. Take a stop watch in with you the next time you go to the gym, and total up on a busy night, how long you spend waiting for all the equipment that you need. Bet you actually spend about 20 minutes in total hanging around, so that hour long workout you told your friends you did was actually only 40 minutes.

5.        

      5. Just because you’re on a piece of equipment doesn’t mean you’re working hard. The amounts of people I see in the gym that don’t even break out in a sweat….what are you doing? If you’re not sweating even a tiny bit then you certainly not working hard enough! If you’re excuse is that you are super fit, up the incline and the speed I bet that problem gets sorted quick enough. Sweating is the body’s way of cooling you down when your heart rate has increased and the blood is pumping round your body, it’s also a way of showing that you’re working at an intensity that will have a health benefit for your body.

6.   

            6. Nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. This is the main part of a healthy lifestyle mainly because it’s the biggest. A twenty minute, high intensity cardio workout burns just over 200 calories. A bottle of orange lucozade has 280 calories. Drinking a bottle of lucozade while running on the treadmill for 20 minutes, you still have consumed 80 more calories than you have burnt off…..get my drift?

7.        

      7. Useless equipment. You pay that massive monthly fee because there is lots of fantastic shiny looking equipment that surely you will use. Truth is the majority of it is useless and can be done with free weights which get you to work harder and are better for you long term.

8.        

      8. Mirror syndrome. Mirrors mirrors everywhere. The majority of people train what they see. The result is bad posture that long term can result in severe back problems. A full body approach should always be used and you should never train what you can see in the mirror alone, remember we have back muscles that need strengthening people!

9.        

      9. Gyms don’t have me.

Exercise and Nutrition...one won’t work without the other

As a personal trainer I often find a lot of the marketed materials that are around for health and fitness. I get bombarded with questions from friends, family, clients and social media contacts, asking about either exercise or nutrition.

More often than not the question will be based upon the general scenario that an article or piece of advice has been put in to practice and not been effective. The question is usually why or what can be done to make it work. Here is where I go back and place emphasis on the fact that the question is about exercise OR nutrition.

One OR the other. The truth is one won’t be effective without the other.

Scenario 1: You take a fitness regime from Men’s Health or Zest, it looks spanking and is probably a pretty good workout, it guarantees results in 4 weeks. 4 weeks down the line you don’t really see or feel much difference.  

Scenario 2: You take a nutrition plan from Men’s Health or Zest, it looks great, tasty, nutritious, so surely the pounds will melt away like it says. 4 weeks down the line you don’t really see or feel much difference.

Conclusion: 4 weeks of either scenario 1 or 2 not working and you decide to scrap it and go back to the way you were. What a waste of time!

In the fitness industry there is masses of information about exercise and nutrition. Don’t get me wrong it is all in its’ own way right, but there is a gap in the education that people are receiving about how to live a healthy lifestyle. There are so many quick fix diets and exercise programmes being advertised, that people’s vision of a healthy lifestyle is either leaning towards diet or exercise.

The truth is that you can’t have an entirely healthy lifestyle if you are only focusing on one without the other. You will never see the true benefits of those hours in the gym if during your workout you are consuming a high glucose drink and then go home and have a meal that doesn’t have a balance of carbohydrate, protein and essential fats. You won’t see the true potential of all those painful hours poured over food labels and calorie counter books if you aren’t exercising to burn fat and build muscle.

Another truth is, that if you have a healthy balance of both, neither should be painful. If your diet is good 80% of the time and you exercise then that 20% is counteracted. If you only exercise for 30 minutes a few times a week but you have a fantastic diet then it is balanced out. Neither of them need hours of blood and tears put into the calorie burn and count because a healthy lifestyle is about finding a balance.

So the next time you spend three hours in the gym and restrict you calorie count to 1200 calories a day, remember that your body needs adequate nutrition to help see the benefits of all that exercise, and a low calorie diet is not the answer. Or you reduce your calorie intake and don’t exercise, remember that despite being slim, you can’t be toned and fit without building muscle through exercise.

One won’t work without the other.