This 40 Marathon Challenge will hopefully soon become a 41 Marathon Challenge

Applying for a Good For Age time for the London Marathon appears to be somewhat of an uncertainty and given the fact that I couldn't run this year I won't quite believe it until I am holding the 'accepted' email in my sweaty mit. But the application is done so now all I have to do is sit back and wait 15 days for the good news to come through. I got the qualifying time at the Stratford Shakespeare Marathon earlier this year having run a 3:04 on a course with some whopping bumps in it so I know there is scope to dip under the 3 hours on the right course with the buzz of a big event.

So if I get in to race the 2015 London Marathon then this will be 20 years after my first ever Marathon. This was the NutraSweet London Marathon of 1995 and I remember it like it was yesterday. Scary to think that the last almost 20 years seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye.

I decided to have a quick search online to see if NutraSweet actually still exists. It does and interestingly when you put 'NutraSweet' into the search engine the choices come up with NutraSweet London Marathon 1995! How Random? Anyway '95 was a baking hot year and a glorious day to be out for a run. I had no idea what I was doing from a training point of view and I seem to remember that my longest run was about 25k in the lead up. But in those days I had youth on my side and really you could rock up to anything and bash it out. Despite this I discovered and hit the wall mainly as a consequence of being overtaken by a tomato! I wasn't actually hallucinating. Obviously a fancy dress tomato. There I was wilting in the sweltering heat and struggling to stay walking and past me trotted a bloody tomato man. He must of been slow roasted inside. Impressive! I eventually finished in 3:57 and proudly stated that I would never run another Marathon again!

So now I have the opportunity to run it again, no longer in the flush of youth but with some knowledge of strength and conditioning, of training principles, physiology and even better my physiology. Ok so the body might not be recovering quite as fast as it did, but then I am also not consuming the amount of alcohol that I did back then and the diet is substantially better than it was when I was a student. The most obvious goal is to go for knocking an hour off, a nice comfy solid 2:57 is appealing on so many levels. Yup, that'll do me, I am certainly running out of opportunities to break 3 hours this year in this challenge. Yes I know I have 22 more opportunities but I've seen the schedule and theres some serious hillage. Lets look at the offroaders, Well one of them has got a claimed over 10,000 ft of ascent in it and 10 hours is considered a good time. Even the roadies are going to be tough. Chesterfield is not the flattest place in the world. IOW marathon only had 2 people dip under the 3 hours. No, I have resigned myself to waiting til next year and doing dedicated focused speed training and all that tapering nonsense and hitting a flat marathon with the buzz of a massive day.

Back to 1995, I have no idea if it was a special year, it was the 15th year and running of the event, but that's hardly an anniversary worth celebrating to any great extent, but one of the other results that came up in the search for 'NutraSweet' and therefore 'NutraSweet London Marathon 1995' was an eBay result for what appears to be a standard finishers medal. View it here. What is that all about? You can guess what I'm thinking... April next year I think I will be listing my 1995 medal together with my 2015 medal and sit back and hopefully add a wad to the myDonate page and bring about a fitting ending to this challenge!