Man up

It was fine to Victoria Park

Where we drank, stretched and selfied

07.03.2015
Day 326 Long Slow Run transferred to Saturday. It was scheduled to be 20 miles at 9 m/m pace. I crashed and burned at 15, staggered another 2 after that, so 17 in toatal. Felt wretched for the rest of the day.

We set off from Greenwich at 11am. Warm sunshine. Dosed up with porridge, toast and coffee, alongside cold cure tablets, containing paracetamol and caffeine, which I hoped would see me through, I stayed with the blokes all the way to Hackney. Our return to south of the river  saw me fade and lose sight of them. What made this failure all the harder for me was that Ted, our leader (marathon race pace predicted 7.30m/m for a 3:16 marathon) has had the same lurgy as me this week, and he's 3 years older than me, but managed to sustain the 20.
So I make no apologies for the sexist title of this blog. I do need to train as concentratedly as a man if I am to meet my predicted race time.
Its international Women's Day tomorrow, a fab date for the second 261 Women's Marathon
It's fortunate I did not sign up, given my broken state.
For IWD Radio 4' Woman' Hour was broadcasting from the South Bank's Woen of the World Festival. A young poet wrote a piece for it, in which she deplored expressions such as 'man up', because it attributed the idea of strength to blokes. However, today our unisex long run saw the two men accelerating further and further ahead of the women, until this strong woman was left all alone, walking pitifully up the final Greenwich Park hill, nauseated, coughing and aching fit to collapse. Depressing.