Countdown to San Javier and waist fluctuations

On Sunday I will take part in my first half-marathon in more than nine months.

Back in February I ran in Torrevieja and set a PB for the fourth race in a row. Seven weeks out from the marathon in London I was buzzing, I was really looking forward to seeing what I could do, both in the marathon and in the further half-marathons I had planned. Three weeks later injury struck, my participation in the marathon was in doubt and I had to pull out of the remaining half's I had planned.

My PB in Torrevieja was 1:27:41, I don't think there is any chance of getting near that on Sunday, I just have not been on the road enough. I have only had three weeks of training towards the race and I haven't run more than 20km since the marathon in April. I feel confident of being able to finish, I did an 18km training run yesterday and finished feeling good, but the speedwork is still to come. I kept myself ticking over through the summer, running two or three times a week, but never more than 12km in a session, with the heat here in August any more is suicidal, and just as the temperature started to fall I was away for two weeks.

I was in Africa for two weeks to climb Kilimanjaro, so spent most of the time at altitude. While spending time at altitude is generally a good idea for distance runners, as you acclimatize your body begins to carry more oxygen in the blood stream so that when you descend again you have to work harder to become breathless, there were a few reasons why the trip was a hinderance rather than a help to my running. Firstly, I wasn't running, I was doing strenuous activity, ascending up to 1,500m in a day, but since trekking involves different muscle groups to running inevitably there will be wastage of some the muscle mass built up from running. This brings me to my second issue, in two weeks I lost almost 10% of my body weight.

I was suffering with diarrhea for a few days, which makes it very difficult to replace the calories burned in climbing the mountains so the inevitable consequence is losing weight. Most running magazines suggest weight loss as a means to improving your PB, but there is a key reason why this simply won't work for most runners, it assumes you are carrying too much weight to start with, in my case this is most definitely not true. Added to that losing such a large amount of body mass in such a short space of time cannot be good.

In the past three weeks I have started to put some weight back on, but it is a slow process, and it is an even slower process to get the weight turned into muscle. However, in the meantime I can just enjoy the extra bowls of ice-cream!