My wife is doing a 5k fun run with a group of colleagues to raise a bit of money for charity. She's not a runner so in order to get her prepared for it we're following the Cool Running Couch-to-5K programme. This is a great little programme which slowly builds you to running a whole 5k which I think is perfect for my wife. I also quite like to get to play coach and add in an additional run several times a week.

So a couple of weeks ago we set off and things started quite well. My wife is nowhere near as unfit as she thought, though she's also nowhere near fit enough to run a full 5k. As a result we've actually been doing slightly more in terms of distance per session than the training programme suggests. Things were going well for the first week and a half and then she got one heck of a headcold and suspected ear infection so the running stopped. We then picked things up again yesterday and had a nice gentle run. Today we went out again and I thought I'd be a little cheeky and change things slightly and see how she coped.

We're meant to be doing the third day of week two: Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and two minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes. but as yesterday went so well and as we've been doing a bit more than the programme suggests (yesterday was 38mins of 90sec run, 2min walk), I upped the running intervals to two minutes each and kept the walking intervals at two minutes each. I also cunningly devised a nice mostly offroad route that was just short of 5k.

Well, I'm pleased to say keeping the conversation going really helped and I think she noticed less of today's run than yesterday. We got back home midway through a running interval so ran back and forth up and down the road until the last two minutes were up.

The result: my wife walked/run 5k on the nose in a time of 43:35 without even knowing it and coped really well. I'm chuffed she's finally hit the 5k mark. Now she just needs to work on running the whole way and she'll breeze through her charity run.

This afternoon's little saunter made a great little pre-race warm-up for tomorrow. I'm feeling great and rested and am really looking forward to tomorrow's race... my first marathon in over 14 years. The weather's looking good too so it should be a good day out.

I think this is a fantastic and apt cover on the May edition of the Boston Magazine...

We initially settled on the idea of commissioning Marathon-related essays from a number of Boston writers, and then set about brainstorming ideas for illustrating that package of stories. Should we create a photo illustration of a runner’s bib in the shape of a heart? Should we photograph a tattered marathon olive wreath on a black background? Then our design director, Brian Struble, and deputy design director, Liz Noftle, came up with the concept of taking shoes worn during the marathon and arranging them so that the negative space is in the shape of a heart. For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I knew as soon as I heard the idea that we had our concept—not just for the collection of essays, but also for the cover. In fact, I quickly realized that the stories of the runners who wore those shoes would be even more powerful than the essays we’d commissioned. We quickly changed course and settled on the cover concept and the outlines of a feature package: We’d shoot the shoes collectively to form the heart, but we’d also photograph them as individual pairs to illustrate the stories told by the runners in the package (which we called “The Shoes We Wore,” and which you’ll find in the May issue).
— Behind Our May Boston Marathon Cover

What a great idea and fitting tribute. I really like the picture and would love to get a copy of the base image without the text.

Of course I instantly noticed the pink Vibrams at the top of the heart

So I'm just short of two weeks from my first marathon in over 14 years and I'm wondering how fast I can and should run it.

I've only ever run one marathon, the one I needed to do one to gain entry into Two Oceans marathon, and it was a terrible performance in which I got caught up with the half marathon runners that started at the same time and I crashed and burned just past half way. I finished, but not in a time worthy of screaming from the rooftops... 4:11 which is terrible when you consider my beautifully paced Two Oceans (56km) time of 4:48.

Since then, I've not raced anything further than 32km since, so I really don't have any recent marathon efforts to go on and thus I have to base my predictions on my performances over shorter distances.

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