Time is short now, there are just a few of these blogs left. Coming up next week will be penultimate episode which sees this story’s protagonist start to pull the threads together, answer some of the questions raised in the previous episodes and begin to neatly tie all of these threads together in preparation of the the grand finale. Will this story end happily? You only need to hang on for a little while longer to find out. This episode, however, needs to set up the holiday special and Season Two of the blog with something left field, preparing the reader for a new journey, my next big challenge. Hopefully the story line will be stronger than Game of Thrones was.

I’m a binge eater. I didn’t even know this was a thing until the end of last year when I joined an ex-girlfriends sister at a board game evening with her flatmate when she was staying in Chiswick. Both of them were therapists, one working with offenders in prison the other specialising in binge eating. Intrigued, I later watched a few of her YouTube videos and recognised so much of my own behaviour it scared me to the point of denial. I wasn’t ready to consider that what I had thought normal for so long were the symptoms of an eating disorder.

All of my focus has been on the running. Working with Jenny on the training set out in Training Peaks and smashing them as best I can. In the background though my new found knowledge has been negatively impacting my habits, which have gotten worse if anything. Maybe I should have seen this coming far earlier. When I smoked I would binge, when I drank I would binge, I was so conscious of this behaviour that I stayed well away from drugs when I was younger and had easy access to them. I already knew how that would end! When I started running less than two years ago, I binged. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is, if I enjoy it then I’m all in.

Right now I think I am the heaviest (and fastest) I have been since starting the running and I am very clear I’m my mind that the discomfort I get in my knee from the OA is exasperated by the additional impact stress put on it, but it has always been my weight to carry and right now I can carry this body for a lot further than I used to be able to. I have every confidence in the fitness I have built around this and the work I have put in to get where I am now. At the same time I am aware that there is another huge battle I need to start to fight, start to win. Without fighting this battle there is no real way I am going to be able to reach my goals in the next 24-30 months.

When I was much younger I used to lift, a lot. My diet then was tailored to my needs and I got big. I put on a lot of muscle and within a few years I was lifting heavy and struggling to find clothes that fitted properly. There was none of this ‘muscle cut’ t-shirts back then. When I landed in hospital with the very acute symptoms of metabolic syndrome I started a diet that allowed my to reverse most of the damage and put my diabetes into remission within ten months. In those instances I worked to plans, I recorded the metrics and treated it almost like a game, a challenge. I could see small incremental differences throughout my life then. I need to find the same now. I need a sports nutritionist to join my team, to help me turn this into a game. To identify goals and then split out the steps that need to be taken to get there. I think I’ve found one and they will hopefully play as big a part in season two of this story as Jenny has, and will continue to.

So what’s coming? When my journey to London comes to a close I’ll start publishing this blog elsewhere. I’ve enjoyed it, it’s been very useful to me personally all the way through this training. It took a little while to get comfortable with it, to have content I felt was interesting enough or I was brave enough to share. This really is just the end of the beginning. Whatever the outcome of this story there will be reflection and analysis before a switch in training to get ready for an even longer distance a few short weeks after the marathon. That will be the Holiday Special. Then I get to do all of this again, another marathon training block to get ready for November. There will be a goal then though, more definite than the ephemeral ‘enjoy it and run the whole thing’ I have for London. After that? I have plans that take me beyond 2025 right now, so there will hopefully be something to read for those that do want to continue to follow this journey of mine

My training during the week has started to feel much more like a taper now. Even Monday’s club run felt easier than it has for the weeks that came before. I dropped the planned interval session in favour of the Sports Psychology Zoom presentation Jenny had arranged, had a great time at Parkrun on Saturday catching up with Eagles getting ready for Boston and Manchester the very next weekend and others on the same journey as me on the way to London. The week ended on a high exploring the green spaces and routes west of Ealing, not somewhere I had ventured before and in the spring sun it was a beautiful way to spend Easter Sunday.

I wasn’t ready for the shit show that was about to come.