Less Than 4 Weeks to Go

There is less than 4 weeks to go for the Chennai Marathon. 

To recap, I had planned for it sometime in September giving me about 13 weeks to train for my second half marathon. My training plan looked good starting out. I had scheduled 4 weeks of warming up (with 2 runs a week) - to fully recover from my foot injury followed by 9 weeks of "proper training". This part of the schedule had me running 3 times per week with an LSD (Long Slow Distance to clarify - standard runner lingo) on the weekends progressing each week by a kilometer and a half. 

At the end of my warming-up period, I registered for the race feeling confident that my foot was coping fine and that it was fully recovered. That not being the case, I found myself having to cut down my running days. By Mid-October (and several tweaks & re-tweaks to the schedule later), I was running just once run a week - the long one over the weekends. To sum up, I'm 9 weeks in and I have only gone on 11 runs since my "training" started - in contrast to the 25 runs that I was meant to have done by now. My total training distance to date is 87.6 k instead of the 231 k that I would have racked up if the original plan was to have been followed.

The misbehaving foot, the rains, and the general being-a-lazy-bum-ness have all contributed more or less equally to this low-key training. 

Just for fun I googled "running half marathon with no training" and came across quite a few articles by runners who had done just that... I loved this one particular blog post and thought it was quite humorously written. The search also threw up a lot more articles on why it was a bad idea to run a half marathon with little to no training. 

Come December 13th, I will be standing at the start line. I am hoping that all the LSDs that I've been consistently (more-or-less) running will ultimately count and that I will be able to see the distance through.

#fingerscrossed