Fighting the fear

And so, another Sunday night is upon us, which means I am now exactly halfway through my 16 week plan til the marathon. This also means I have 2 weeks until the Silverstone Half, and 3 weeks until Ashby 20. Oh. My. God. It's 1st March...where has this year gone?!!! Am I ready? I don't know if I'm ready. It's all getting a bit real and I feel sick with nerves and fear.

2 weeks and counting...

I'm not typically a "fear" sort of person. If something scares me I prefer to tackle it head-on, break it down into manageable pieces then laugh in its face. But this is different, when I think that I'm running Silverstone in 2 weeks I get a chill rush through me and my heart starts to pound a little faster. What am I scared of? 13.1 miles is nothing to me really; I regularly do longer runs competently. I shouldn't be scared. Yet I am.

Today's long run was a case in point; I woke up this morning feeling exhausted, continued to feel exhausted after my porridge breakfast, and felt exhausted as I stepped outside the front door. The first couple of miles were actually ok, I settled nicely into 9 minute miles which appears to have become my new "comfortable pace". Then I hit the wall. At 2 miles. I'm not kidding here. My body just shut down on me. And you know what? It's completely my fault. I barely ate yesterday because I was meeting an old friend and felt too embarrassed eating in front of her, didn't want to appear greedy or fat. I missed breakfast and lunch on Friday, and Thursday wasn't much better. I am so damn stupid. Eating is a basic human function - a human right - as essential as breathing, and yet it's as difficult for me as would be performing open heart surgery on myself without any analgesia and fully conscious. Every day I find a reason to skip a meal or swap it with an apple. My body is so used to this and for the most part it copes relatively well. But it doesn't work with running. I can do most of my training sessions relatively well on very little food at all. They're tough but I can survive on immediate carbohydrate sources such as a piece of fruit before I go in or even some sweets. But the truth is told on my long runs, and the longer they get the more apparent it is becoming that I can't do this for much longer.

Weirfields

So today I set out with a nice 13-15 miler up through Attenborough Nature Reserve planned. I've never been there despite having lived in Nottingham for almost 14 years so it seemed like a good idea. The wind was horrendous, it always seemed to hit me head-on, at times making me almost run on the spot it was so strong, and depleting me of energy in the process. Yet Sod's Law dictated that whenever I turned around and ran in the opposite direction, the wind also changed direction so I very seldom had it behind me, acting as a gentle hand pushing me forwards. Oh I so badly wanted to call it a day and go home to my family and warm house, but I'm too stubborn for that and persevered. I can honestly say that there was very little about today's run that I enjoyed. My body just had nothing to give. Not even gel bloks and a bit of lucozade sport could give me the much-needed energy boost to get into a good rhythm. That's when the gremlin started. No, I don't mean a gremlin like old Spike here:

Spike

My gremlin is very different. Like a little demon on my shoulder it is always there, whispering in my ear, responsible for all the feelings of self-doubt I have, all the anorexic thoughts and pretty much all my negative thoughts. A lot of the time I can drown it out and not pay it much attention. But on my long runs it's just me, it and the road. It makes me doubt myself. Can I really run this far? Why do I even call myself a runner? I can't run I should stop and walk. You get the idea. Today the major theme running through my head was I should've fuelled better, the only person to blame for having such a lousy run is myself. I've wasted a whole week's worth of long run because I cheated at fuelling. The worst thing is I knew it was right. It was my fault. And slowly I started to convince myself that EVERYBODY at Silverstone will be faster than me, have more stamina and make me look like a beginner. What if I can't run for more than a mile before I need to walk? Or even worse, what if it's as difficult as the GSR was and I come out feeling like a complete failure? 

No more.

I am so very lucky to have so much support with my running. My husband is prepared to spend a whole day without me at the weekend so I can complete a long run, and never begrudges me that. TT puts up with me messaging him needing a kick up the bum and never tells me to pull myself together and leave him alone. My friends and family are all rooting for me. For all those people with so much love for me I am so very grateful. But scaffolding will not support a building that is crumbling, so I need to work on myself now and strengthen my own resolve, because at the end of the day it's me, the road, and the damn gremlin. I need to figure out a way to empower myself to kick that gremlin into touch. I need to make peace with the need to fuel, if only for the long runs. 

Music helps me a lot.

Today I had Pink telling me to try, Swedish House Mafia told me not to worry and Matchbox Twenty told me to look how far we've come.

You'd be amazed at how you can relate certain lyrics to a specific occasion, but I do found music incredibly powerful. I do not, however, understand why Eye of the Tiger is supposedly the runners' anthem, but maybe I missed the point there!

So I need to get fuelling savvy. Tonight I ordered a box the the High 5 gels which made me a bit wappy during my 20 miler 2 weeks ago. I'm thinking that, given my generally depleted glycogen stores, I need to refuel a bit more aggressively on long runs, and try to ignore the anorexic voice in my head arguing about the ingestion of pure carbs. I need to set aside Saturdays as a fuelling day as much as I set aside Sundays as long run days. It's going to be tough as it's all too easy to "conveniently forget", but I think if I want to make a success of the coming 8 weeks and 3 races I need to grow a pair and get on with it. It worked for the 20 miler, it'll work again, and I don't know what feels worse; eating a bit more and all the associated feelings with that, or knowing during a run that I am failing because I didn't even try to eat beforehand. I can always cut right back again after VLM, right? Or maybe I won't feel the need to by then.

But my week hasn't been all doom and gloom. It's had some special moments in. The 1k virtual run that I did with the year 6s at my son's school was such a success that I've been given the go ahead to set up a running club at the school! This is super exciting! It was lovely to see so many children genuinely excited to do the run, and some of them were very good at it. I'm keen on making sport accessible to children, and helping them to develop a love for running would be amazing. In addition to this I have been elected as Welfare Officer at my NWR club which is just wonderful. It will allow me to use skills I developed when I studied medicine and trained with ChildLine, in an area I love. Win win.

And finally, as Trevor McDonald would say. 6 years ago when I started running (before damaging my knees having been sold the wrong type of shoes) my big running aim was to enter and run the Robin Hood Half Marathon. I have remembered this dream for all these years, and tonight I actually did it. On September 27th 2015 I will be fulfilling another dream. Time to look forwards.