My 2020 Review

As we all know 2020 has been a rather strange year and has not exactly gone to plan.

I had big plans for this year. With 2 big city marathons booked and plans of going under 3 hours at least once. Understandably all of this had to be put on hold.

Let’s start at the beginning before the term COVID-19 had been invented and nobody had a clue what social distancing was.

My marathon training for Manchester Marathon had started between Christmas and New Year and was in full swing. After doing London in 2019 I had decided to train slightly different by doing 5 sessions a week instead of 4.

In my training I had managed to include Cross Country races and a couple of league road races as well. The Cross country was first and went well with our club performing well.

I am not a big fan of Cross Country and do it more to be part of the team than for myself. I don’t have the confidence on the changing surfaces to be any good at it.

The 3rd of the years races was cancelled because of the weather to take place at a later date. At the time we did not know this would be the first of many race cancellations that we would have to put up with this year. The race never happened.

We did manage to fit in the first 2 of the road league races.

I was very pleased with my performances in these. Getting personal bests over the 6 and 7 mile distances. The 6 mile effort being done after a 20 mile training run the day before.

This is where things started to go wrong. The virus had spread to the UK and we were starting to be told to keep apart.

In the space of a couple of days my 2 main spring races were cancelled. The Manchester Marathon and the Ashby 20 that I was using as my main warm up race.

At very short notice I booked a different 20 mile race (Gloucester 20) on the same day as Ashby and went there with a group that I had been training with. It turned out to be a good decision as the race went really well. It was also the last time I would race for 7 months.

During the first lockdown I managed to tick over ok and took part in a couple of virtual events. They don’t have the same feel as real races but it gave me something to aim at.

During the summer I started to feel that I wasn’t progressing any so looked for an online coaching company that I could use to improve my running.

I found Purdue Performance and joined them at the start of September.

The first thing I did with them was start Half Marathon training ready for a socially distanced race that I had booked for the middle of October.

This proved to be a really good decision as they have really helped to keep me on track and come up with sessions that I would not normally have done on my own.

The race that I had booked got cancelled (again) but I managed to find another the following week that did go ahead.

I had a really good race and managed to take 6 minutes off my old PB. (Bedford Half Marathon)

This was the only race I managed for the remainder of the year after a couple of other around the same time got cancelled.

Over all it has not been too bad a year. I am still massively disappointed that I didn’t get to run either of my marathons but I did manage to set PBs over 4 distances.

I have high hopes for 2021, but I will leave that for another post.