Running up Mt Kilimanjaro

Janathon totals to date are 

Janathon Day 1 - 5 miles
Day 2 - 5 miles
Day 3 - 4 miles
Day 4 - 4 miles
Day 5 - 3 miles
Day 6 - Total 2.52 miles


Total 23.52 miles


Short of time today so my shortest run of Janathon so far was a 2.5 mile effort. In fact looking at my training I have consistently been reducing my mileage each day.

The good news was that it was my quickest run of Janathon so far perhaps because I was in a hurry . I am also injury free so Janathon is going very well.

I had a quick listen this morning to the Marathon Talk podcast I am a little bit behind on episode 47 which was released on December the 1st.  In this episode there was mention of Toby Tanser who has just run from Mombasa all the way to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.  Take a look at this wonderful video which is truly inspirational. Its quite a challenge for a great cause and he only had the  distance,heat, altitude, possibility of being attacked by wild animals and the climb up the largest free standing mountain in the world to worry about. I was drawn to it as I went on a combined holiday in Africa in 2000 where I climbed Kilimanjaro and was then flown back from Tanzania to Mombasa in Kenya on the coast .

Simply mind boggling to even contemplate running up Kilimanjaro let alone the warm up run from Mombasa to Moshi. If you don't know Tanser he is involved with the running shoes for Africa charity.

With this in mind I hope to do a bit more than 2.5 miles tomorrow!

Day 2 of 77 of the Runners World Smart Coach Schedule

Day 2 of my 11 week half marathon schedule called for a rest day. I can do that and to be fair I have just completed day 3 , week 3 of the push ups programme. Tonight I did 5 sets of push ups which included sets of 22, 30 , 20, 20 followed by a final set of 30 . Grand total of 122 for the 5 sets though don't think I could do much more than what I am doing in one set at the moment.

My schedule really begins to get going tomorrow night with a tempo run weather allowing. Tempo runs were absent from my training last year so I am really looking forward to this at the moment. According to Toby Tanser tempo runs are the single most important session you can do to improve your speed for any race distance. Interesting to me is the view from Tanser that tempo runs trump track sessions for the longer distance runner as it obviously trains your body to sustain speed over distance.

I would normally attend a track session once or twice a week but will cut this back to perhaps just the one for the period of this schedule. It would seem that tempo running is more important than speedwork for the half and full marathon

What is a tempo run? From what I have read it is a comfortably hard run for 2-4 miles. It is not race pace but if you could you would slow down. A good easy warm up and cool down with the tempo run being the meat in the sandwich.

An interesting site on Toby Tanser and his work can be found here