How hard can it be? 🏃♂️🏃♂️🏃♂️
On June 3rd 2025 I was convinced by some family members to sign up with them to do a half marathon in Edinburgh. How hard could it be was my thinking, I’ve got over a year to prepare… Fast forward and as of today I’m 7 weeks and 2 days away from my first ever half marathon. I thought this would be a fun challenge and a way to improve my fitness, and it has been, but it’s also inspired me to see that actually it’s possible to do things I never really thought I would have been able to do.
Foolishly I didn’t start training until February 2026. Leaving me 3 months to prepare myself for the half marathon which is most definitely going to come back to bite me. Running my first 3KM in a long time really shocked my body and I genuinely considered dropping out as I was now going to be doing the race alone. As the family members who convinced me dropped out one at a time :( But I struggled on through, mainly as I’d told people I was going to be doing this and I couldn’t back down now…
I felt good for the first 6 weeks running as I began to be able to run distances of 5KM to 6KM comfortably. But as I began to surpass these distances my legs started to take more of a beating. Pain started to kick in, as I was foolish and had to bump up my distance each week faster than I really should be doing, it naturally caused some pain in my shins. One of the most common injuries runners can get, often referred to as shin splints, has dampened my spirits lately. However my increase in distance and 5 year old running shoes are not doing me any favours so I invested in a new pair of running shoes.
The ASICS Novablast 5s are regarded as one of the best “everyday” running shoes, well cushioned to provide comfort on short and long runs. I opened myself up to a crazy world where some runners have a shoe rotation for different types of runs, race day shoes, easy run shoes, tempo run shoes and more! I knew race day type shoes would exist but didn’t expect there to be so many. Many reviews implied the Novablast was one of the best values for a runner with only 1 shoe in their rotation, great for races up to half marathons and for all kinds of training. So it seems like a good pick for me :)
Now if you’ve read any of my posts in the past then you know I LOVE tech. I nerd out over tech almost daily, reading about new gadgets and so on. So you’ll not be surprised I’ve been looking into wearables. I won’t go into much detail here as I could write a novel on this but to summarise I invested in a Garmin Forerunner 570 42mm. Being able to view my pace in real time, alerts telling me to slow down (or more frequently to speed up…) have been a game changer. This has been great to track my runs, improve my fitness and also to keep me motivated. Keep an eye out for a dedicated post about this one coming soon!
With around 7 weeks to go, I’m feeling very optimistic. Could I have started training earlier? Definitely yes, but at the very least it has got me more invested than I’ve ever been in my personal health and fitness. Which is a huge win, I’ve never thought much about what I eat or doing exercise so this has been a huge mental shift for me in the last 8 weeks whilst preparing. I’d encourage any of you out there to sign up for a race of any distance, having something booked in the calendar really forces you to get out there!
