An excellent start

Today feels like the first of January.

It's not, it's the fifth. But in usual glacial fashion, it's taken me a while to get into the new year.

After approximately 18 hours' sleep, I leapt out of bed this morning, finally ready to face 2012.

Today my marathon training would begin properly. Again.

Step 1: A banana for breakfast. My physio friend has instructed me I must start running with something in my tum. It needs to get used to fuelling-up if I'm to do 26.2 miles comfortably. Or even, uncomfortably.

Step 2: Warm-up. This involved some half-hearted toe-touching and rolling my head about a bit. I'm sure my neck is getting shorter.

Step 3: Stopwatch. I've currently ditched Nike+ etc... It's just me and my trusty stopwatch, especially necessary as I intended to begin my high intensity work-out, which leads me to...

Step 4: Apologies to the residents of Haverstock Hill. If you thought you heard a sealion giving birth this morning, it was just me interval training. One minute jogging, one minute sprinting. That was the aim. The reality was 10 minutes of jogging, one minute of sprinting, fifteen minutes of wheezing and retching.

Step 5: Apologies also to my flatmate's mum. I didn't know she was in the kitchen and burst in post-run, sweating and red-faced like the ghost of Christmas past. I don't know who was more shocked. On the plus side, it raised both our heart rates to a nice healthy level.

Step 6: Core-work and foam roller warm-down. My physio friend has taken a special interest in my marathon training. She kindly gave me a foam roller for Christmas, which I can use to stretch out my muscles. She's also been beating into me (quite literally) the importance of intensive training over endurance. She's being ever so helpful. I suspect seeing me in pain is just a nice bonus.

So, all in all, a good hour of proper exercise and a lovely start to the new year. Better five days late than never, I say.

(Pic: My new foam roller. We'll be spending a lot of time together over the next few months.)

Thanks to Huey Morgan on 6Music for playing a selection of very good tunes to accompany my stretching and rolling, including this: