Weeks 14, 15, 16 – The Taper
This may be the shortest post of the lot, because it’s the night before the night before the big day and the one top tip everyone says is to get plenty of sleep in the days leading up to the marathon. Daz’s prep for Brighton included 3 nights of 5 hour sleeps, so there is definite room for improvement!
The taper started in week 14 with each of us completing half marathons. Something that just 12 months ago would have meant similar levels of preparation to the marathon, is now tackled as taper week is huge insight into just how far we have all come. It was also the first time Lissi tried caffeine gels… a story that honestly needs it’s own blog post! Safe to say we are sticking to decaffeinated teabags at chez Kittendorf!
Weeks 15 and 16 saw the somewhat expected niggles creeping in, especially for Daz and Lissi. It meant the taper was welcomed with open arms by Daz, and the bike was wheeled out the shed. The relentless Weeman has seemed to barely break stride as he powers towards the marathon.
Our personalities have really come to the fore this last couple of weeks. Lissi had started stressing out since week 14, and spent steadily increasing amounts of money to solve ever reducing problems. Weeman is all planned, packed and has already arrived in London even completing a shakedown run! Leaving Daz, the coolest cucumber of the lot who has taken a little too much advantage of the taper and increased carb loading! He might need to do two laps…
So now all that remains is to leave you with some stats about the training before the final blog post next week!
Lissi:
Total Training Km: 376.73
Average 23.54 per week – but not indicative of all the physio, strength workouts, Pilates and bike work to try and balance kms and foot pain levels!)
Max Week: 47.43km
Only 3 missed runs, completing 43 runs! The only missed run with no bike replacement was that Ofsted week.
Daz:
Total Training Km: 548.66
Average 34.29 per week
Max Week: 55.84km
Missed the most runs of 7 – including 2 rounds of illness (but biked a lot of those!), and 2 runs in week 1! He still managed to complete 39 runs.
Weeman:
Total Training Km: 732.23
Average 45.75 per week
Max Week: 63.47km
Only 1 missed run on a 4 run per week plan! A total of 62 runs since January 7th.
Total: 1657.62 kms
Finally a shout out to the real heroes of this blog - you guys and gals out there who have been incredibly supportive. A massive THANK YOU to everyone that sponsored us, obliterating our target. The generosity shown towards such a brilliant charity has been a great source of inspiration for us. An equally heart felt - “sorry” has to be said to friends, work colleagues, and random strangers that have had to put up with our never ending talk of all things running related. To everyone that took time out of their day to read the blogs and showed interest in our journey, thank you - you will be in our minds powering us to the finish line on Sunday. Lastly, a final thank you to our biggest fan, Tom Kittendorf, who eagerly awaits these posts every week and badgers me to publish them. Always a source of good humour despite his own injury woes of late and is sure to be looking forward to “the big one” next week!