"London Marathon 2025: Getting in Shape Again for the Ultimate Running Challenge!"

Back on the Road After yesterday’s rest day, I was absolutely raring to go this morning! There are few things more satisfying than feeling properly recovered and ready to get back to training. I got up in good time, brewed a much-needed coffee and set off for The Math School with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for people discovering an extra biscuit in the tin. On arrival, I checked my watch and was pleased to see a 46-minute base run on the schedule. With the daylight already staking its claim over the morning—a welcome shift from those cold, dark starts—I decided to extend my run by another ten minutes. My route took me through Borstal, across the Medway Bridge and into Strood, a journey made all the more pleasant by the fact that, for once, my legs and lungs were in quiet agreement about the pace. Running with Purpose It was wonderful to enjoy a morning run where every step felt purposeful, rather than a grand negotiation between body and willpower. These steady runs are wh...

An Early Start for a Big Challenge Day 4 of my London Marathon 2025 training, and here I am, braving the unholy hour of 6:30 am on New Year's Eve for a session of anaerobic intervals. It’s a bit like starting a diet at a buffet—ambitious and faintly ridiculous, but you press on anyway. The Workout: Intervals That Test Your Limits After a 15-minute warm-up that mostly involved trying to convince my legs they weren’t still in bed, I launched into the main workout: 5 intervals of 40 seconds running hard at a 4:10 min/km pace. Between these sprints, I took 3-minute recovery periods, walking until my heart rate settled down to something vaguely human before easing into a gentle jog. The Science of Anaerobic Training For those unfamiliar, anaerobic exercise is essentially the art of asking your body to produce energy without enough oxygen, relying on the lactic acid system instead. This works by burning carbohydrates in a way that, while efficient, leaves your muscles with that delightfu...