An #Extra Training Session

You may have seen the London Marathon #extramile campaign on social media channels or visited the extramile website (www.extramile.co.uk). You may have also read my previous blog post about the campaign and how much I am enjoying being able to share my marathon journey with fellow runners and anyone else who may be interested! Well thanks to my regular Twitter updates, and frequent (often very unflattering) running related Instagram images, I have been chosen as an #extramile ambassador – basically recognised as someone who spends lot of time on social media talking about running!

The wonderfully unexpected bonus of this accolade is that I have been invited to attend a training day in London next weekend with other selected #extramile London Marathon ambassadors. On Friday 6th March I will be making the long commute down to London, then across the city to Lensbury Hotel in Twickenham. Here I shall meet the other ambassadors over dinner – which I am sure will be fuelled with high levels of running and training related conversation, as well as fuelling us for the forthcoming training happening the next day.

On Saturday 7th we shall be spending the  day with Martin Yelling. Martin is a former international runner, elite multisport athlete  and Hawaii Ironman finisher who has coached runners from novices through to champions.  Martin is also the founder of the UK's number one running podcast - Marathon Talk- and owner of Yelling Performance, as well as regularly contributing to running, health and fitness publications. His wife is also Liz, Yelling, 2 x Olympic marathon runner, so basically he knows his stuff!

Martin will be giving us a pre training talk, leading is through a track based marathon training session, and also taking part in a question and answer session. I am very excited to be able to learn from what Martin has to say, and hopefully pick up some advice and be able to answer those niggling questions I have in my mind. The track based session actually scares me a little! I don't think I have run on a track since high school so it feels a little out of my comfort zone! I am ready for the challenge anyway!

Then it will be back to Lincoln for me ready for a lovely long run on the Sunday – which hopefully I will be feeling even more inspired than usual to complete!