Most of the time, if I’m exercising regularly, I’m doing it for no more reason that to maintain and improve my health. For the last few months though, I couldn’t find the level of motivation I needed to stick to a routine. Maybe it’s the Polish winters.

Anyway, I realised that one thing would motivate me, and that was running a half-marathon again. I got a spot in the Great North Run, which I’ve done a few times before, and now I have a goal that I really want to achieve, that’s also going to require me to improve my fitness levels.

The run is in September, so I still have a lot of time to train. Good job too, because shortly after I got my place, I finally caught covid. Then after gently starting training, I got an overuse injury from moving a bunch of boxes. Still, I’ve stuck with it, and things are improving.

The biggest risks I can see to not completing it, the pre-mortem, are getting injured or losing motivation. I’m not too concerned about my motivation right now, but injury could be a real problem: painful to admit, but I really am a fat middle-aged man trying to reclaim some former glory, and ego might make me do something dumb. So I am trying to eat right, stretch properly, listen to my body… all the things I didn’t bother doing in my 20s!

I’ve used a Hal Higdon plan before, with great success. To make good use of the time that I have now, I spliced together a couple of his plans to cover the next 14 weeks. Behold, my Frankenstein’s monster of a plan:

I almost followed the first week listed here, and I’m doing better at the second week. I’m tracking progress in a publicly-viewable Google doc, for myself and for accountability!

My real desire, if I dare name it, is to finish in under two hours. That may be too much to hope for given my current fitness levels, and I’d far rather jog the course in 2h15m than get injured training for 1h55m. But 1h55m would be very satisfying.