High five to LEP Member Kab who ran a marathon and raised £1,500 for a charity called CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) – Calm is an award-winning charity dedicated to preventing male suicide.

In this blog post Kab shares his story in his own words about how he went from doing very little exercise, to building up for a marathon in just over 1 year…

Motivation…

Initially I wanted to start training because I knew that I was a bit overweight and wanted to address that. Particularly I wasn’t happy with how I looked compared to old photos.

When I was younger I set myself a life goal of running a marathon before I turned 30. Unfortunately 30 came and went and I hadn’t really done anything about it so I decided to combine wanting to lose weight with training for a marathon and set a new goal of running a marathon before getting married.

I ran the marathon for a charity called CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably). They are a men’s mental health charity which look at ways of breaking down male stereotypes in order to get men talking more. 

Depression amongst men goes largely unacknowledged and as such suicide rates, particularly of young men, are very high. One of the simplest first steps towards combating this is getting men to talk and trying to change the prevailing feeling that men “shouldn’t talk about their feelings”.

The Training Schedule…

I followed a regime of doing 2 short runs and a personal training session with Nick each week, I also did a long run at the weekend. I gradually increased the distances of all of the runs so that around 4 weeks before the date of the marathon I did a 20 mile run. Over the next 3 weeks I decreased my long runs (tapered) so that I was prepared for the full 26.2 miles on the day.

The biggest thing that I was able to do was pretty much stop drinking alcohol in the last three months of training. There were a handful of occasions where I would have A drink but I wouldn’t beat myself up about it. It just meant that I had to make sure I definitely stuck to my training that week! 

I also tried carb cycling but struggled to do this rigidly. However, even by trying to do it I found that I cut down on carbs and tended to only have them related to my training sessions. Alongside improving my fitness I’ve also lost around 6kg, which is around a stone in weight.

Challenges…

The toughest part was trying to keep up with training during the rubbish weather. When we had lots of snow I didn’t want to risk running in slippy conditions and injuring myself. This set me back a bit with my long runs and meant that I had to jump ahead with some of my distances rather than build them up.

The hardest part is the first step. My advice would be to start with something small so that you don’t find it too daunting. Once you get going with a fitness regime you’ll want to keep going and you’ll find that you start to crave exercise, whether that’s a run, a swim or a gym session you’ll find something you enjoy! If you’ve never really done anything before then even going out for a walk would be a great way to start!

The Future… 

I’m not sure about further marathon goals. I would love to do another one but for now I’m going to focus on shorter distances such as 10k and half marathons. I’ve already signed up to several 10k races later in the year and I’m looking at trying to fit in a couple of half marathons too! For now I’m going to aim to improve my times over those distances and maybe consider another marathon in a year or two.