The drive to Inverness for the Loch Ness Marathon was a good indicator of what was to come; it was staggeringly beautiful and it was a very long way! Rather than stay in Inverness itself, I chose to stay about 45 minutes away in Aviemore where the hotels were plentiful and guaranteed family friendly. However, as the kids headed off to the pool and I started my 90 minute journey just to register I began to think the Aviemore plan may have been a mistake. I suppose mandatory registration the day before an event is intended to create a buzz around the event village, but I could happily live without it.

Having picked up my race number I headed back to Aviemore where I ate as much pasta as I could stomach before heading to bed for an early night. Morning came far too soon. Maximum effort on fuelling and hydration coupled with some pre-race nerves meant a queasy start to the day, and judging by the queues for the portaloos at the bus park I was not alone in enduring an upset stomach!

It is a cruel ‘feature’ of the Loch Ness Marathon that all runners are bussed from the centre of Inverness to the start line high in the hills on the south side of the loch. Nothing quite emphasises the huge distance about to be run like being driven the entire length of the course before the start. The sense of collective foreboding added to the camaraderie onboard the rickety old double decker though, and throughout the journey runners made new acquaintances whilst swapping wine gums and war stories from training .

The start of the race is almost comically remote; a sense only amplified by seeing the empty buses drive off back to Inverness. At this point there is literally no going back. As Bryan Burnett rather too gleefully says in the promotional video filmed on the start line, ‘the only way back to Inverness is 26 miles that way’. Even though the weather was relatively mild, the start is high and exposed. I had a space blanket that I was extremely thankful for. There were plenty of people not so well equipped, and by the time the gun went some of them had taken on a quite unnatural blue hue.

By the time we started everyone was thankful just to be running at long last. The first section is sharply downhill, which was quite painful on cold muscles and joints. However, spirits were high and the banter good. The positive vibe certainly lasted for the first 10 miles, all of which are downhill with a total descent of over 300m. Those first 10 miles are disarming. It is very hard to judge how things are going when you aren’t being made to work for the miles. A marathon is a long way though, and it transpired there would be plenty of opportunity to work hard!

The section between 10 and 17 miles is flat along the loch side. My focus in this section was simply to hold a reasonable pace to tick the miles off one by one and break the back of the race. This proved to be a very sociable stretch and I fell into conversations ranging from post race meals to Scottish Independence, and all without a cross word being said!

At my level, a marathon is always going to go wrong. It is just a matter of when. A quick glance at the profile of the race makes it abundantly clear where the ‘having fun/not having fun’ transition is most likely. At 17 miles there is a long, relentless hill that just keeps giving as the route begins to track inland. Cruelly, the hill arrives at just the point most amateur marathon runners are beginning to feel a bit wobbly. Suddenly the reassuring constant pound of a running stride broke into a punctuated run/walk as literally everyone was broken by the hill. I found this section very difficult. I never fully recovered my lost rhythm with the result that the last 8 or 9 miles became a survival wobble. As I came into Inverness itself over the last mile or so, the wobble became more determined, but all style had gone and this was now a run powered by grimace.

I’ve never known a finish straight to feel shorter than it is, and the finish on the banks of the River Ness was no exception. I finally finished in a ‘tunnel vision trot’ 4 hours and 35 minutes after I started, cheered over the line by my wife and girls. I was very happy to finish, but I probably felt more relieved than elated.

After any endurance event I always find myself asking 2 questions:

• Would I do it again?
• Could I have done it faster?

Never say never, but I can’t imagine doing the training for a marathon again unless it was for a very specific target, such as a four hour time. And that wouldn’t be easy. I trained relatively hard for this marathon and I was nowhere near prepared enough to run it well. I ran the first half in 2 hours, which was exactly what I expected. In the second half I imploded and lost 35 minutes, which again is exactly what I expected. The easiest way to go faster would be to not implode in the second half, but that would require so much more training at the 3 hour plus mark that it would take over my life. In short, I could go faster, but it would require a lifestyle change and a dedication to the cause that I’m not sure I’m ready to give.

But that is a debate for another day. For now all that matters is on the bucket list it says – marathon: tick!

Running a marathon has always been one of those life “must do’s”. I always assumed that it was inevitable that one day I would run one; surely these things just ‘happen’. However, by the time of my 46th birthday it hadn’t happened and, given my fitness at that time had achieved an all time low (thanks Garmin for the brutal truth), it seemed a marathon was becoming increasingly unlikely.

That was the trigger. That night I entered the Loch Ness Marathon, and just to make sure I didn’t chicken out, I told Facebook and Instagram. There’s no going back after that!

I did consider a few other events before settling on Loch Ness. Initially I had planned to run a city marathon, but the London ballot is too unpredictable and marathons abroad became expensive very quickly. I figured that if I couldn’t have cheering crowds to motivate me then the next best option was to do something where the setting was beautiful and spectacular. Loch Ness certainly fitted that bill, and after I’d read the reviews from previous years I was sure that it would be a well organised and memorable race. The date was set: M day was 2nd October 2022.

One of the advantages of being more massive and less fit than ever before is that improvements come very quickly. I started in the January dark, doing an awkward run/walk shuffle around for about 4 kms at a time. My plan at this stage was to pre-train; to get good enough to start a ‘proper’ training plan in the Spring. Fairly quickly I fell into a routine of doing two shortish runs during the week and a longer run at the weekends, although at this stage 7 kms counted as a long run! On Monday nights I ran around the very dark running track while my daughter was at hockey training. Track running really helped with building confidence, pacing and avoiding injury, even if I did have an irrational fear that I was about to run into something (or someone) in the pitch dark!

I had intended to follow a more prescriptive training scheduled as my fitness improved. I had been given Chris Evans’ book ‘119 Days to Go’, which as the title suggests provides a day by day training programme lasting 17 weeks. Sadly my ability to follow a daily training plan was limited by my inflexible (and sometimes unpredictable) work/life routine, but reading the book was still helpful. Not least it gave me the confidence to not run too much. It also reassured me that being able to run 7 miles at steady pace with 5 months to go is comfortably ahead of the training curve.

Then the injuries started. Perhaps it is age, but I seemed particularly badly afflicted by niggling injuries for the majority of my training. If I am being honest with myself, I suspect the real underlying cause was being too heavy. I had planned to lose 10Kg before starting training, but that never happened. I therefore ran 1000km over a year putting far more strain on my body than I should have done. I lost around 7 weeks of training to injuries including, patella tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, a calf strain and odd back spasms. I learnt that compression socks and patella bands work well, and I also re-learned that when something hurts it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to stop. By the end of my training I’d say I was at a constant 3/10 on the pain scale across my various ailments. But I found that was sustainable.

My biggest worry throughout my training year was that I might not even make it to the start, and even with weeks to go that was in doubt. I gave up all hope of being ‘ready’ and was ultimately just happy to be there at all. Over the 10 months of training I ran just under 1000kms. I did around 8 runs that were longer than a half marathon and my longest run was about 35kms. A few years ago I cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats. After training for that I realised I trained far more than I needed to. The reward for that was the event itself was relatively straightforward and pain free. For the marathon the opposite was true. I was underprepared and I certainly didn’t have enough long runs in my legs. I knew it was going to hurt, but at least I made it to the start!