"The Legend"

This morning I got up early after having prepared the maps yesterday and headed off to explore "the legend" marathon course. If you haven't heard of it check out www.thelegend.co.nz for all the details, background and maps. Basically Arthur Lydiard is a running legend and this area of the city was where he would train his athletes. Friends from Auckland who have done the C2C have talked about running up these hills as good training for the day. So I thought I better go exploring...

It is an amazing course (to drive :p). Once you get out of the built up suburbs you start heading up into bush like area that is stunning. As I drove it I thought to myself...could I ever run this whole thing? Well lets hope so or race day is gonna be pretty tough. There were various runners and cyclists out on the road and so it was great to realise I can also use this course to cycle on too...some killer hills that I know I will come to have a love hate relationship with.

After driving the full, I went back and drove the 1/2 course - this is the one I am intending to run on race day in September as I have the Auckland Marathon in October. The two courses start differently then have a section that is the same, and ends the same but the 1/2 skips the big chunk of hill in the middle.

So with all that driving around I thought I best get out and actually run some. So I did the first 7km loop that the full does. I have come to the conclusion I need to stop being an idiot and make my way to the physio. This achillies is not getting any better, in fact its probably getting worse. Thankfully I have a physio right next door to work so I should be able to get an appt.

I'm looking forward to Saturdays when I will train on the legend course and Feb 2012 when all this training will come together on race day....until then its gonna be a lot of sweat, definitely some tears (of the watery kind not the muscle kind) and hopefully not too much blood!