First time London Marathon runner - eek! by greenwelly

Yes I know, can't keep me away from this website these days, I'm finding that its the best place to release my pre-marathon excitement, as the boyfriend and most family and friends are a bit sick of me now.

Don't seem to  be able to focus on much this week at all, just want it to be Saturday morning really so we can hop into the car and head off towards london for the weekend.

Running-wise, today was my 2nd run of the week, 4 miles at marathon pace (I guess the purpose of this is to make sure I remember what my marathon pace feels like, as all these short taper runs have been faster than marathon pace). Now this leads me onto opening a can of worms.... what is the best way to work out your running pace?

I don't have one of these flashy garmin watches or anything, but for the first 4-5 months of training I was using an app on my i-phone called Runkeeper to track my runs using the GPS inside the phone. I have never been certain of how accurate this was and I was astounded that I seemed to find it so hard to run under 10min/miles... so one day I mapped out one of my runs on Mapmyrun.com and shock horror, mapmyrun told me that the run was actually longer than my iphone thought it was...... so since then I have flitted between both options and actually the Runkeeper app decided to stop working about 3 weeks ago, so my last few weeks of training have been mapped out on mapmyrun before going out and then I use the workout calculator to determine my average pace. But the question remains, which is more accurate?

If Runkeeper GPS system is to be believed then I am quite a slow runner (most runs over 10mins mile, even the short runs) and if mapmyrun is to be believed then I'm more like a 9.30min/mile runner. I know which camp I'm in!!!! Please someone tell me Mapmyrun is a good reliable accurate method to use!!! I guess I'll find out on Sunday.

Anyway, looking forward to the carb loading beginning tomorrow, cupboard is well stocked with cereal bars, potatoes, scotch pancakes (that's down to you simonedumerque!), etc etc. Can't wait, I love carbs.

Doing a trial run tonight of printing my charity logos onto my running vest. (As a ballot place runner I decided to run for 3 charities and so will be using one of the charities' vests to run in, but i want to put the other charity logos onto that vest too....) and I'm told a good way to to do it is with these printable iron-on transfers. Never done it before, hence a trial run with it tonight on a old t-shirt and with the technical help of the boyfriend for the printing bit. Should be interesting.  Must remember to leave space for my running number and name though.

Anyway, goodness my posts are always so long aren't they? Sorry about that but I just can't contain my excitement. The only downside of this weekend is having to send my little puppy off to kennels again. (She's not really a puppy anymore, 11 months old, but will always be my baby!) We put her in for the first time over New year and she hated it, didn't eat a thing and came back all traumatised, whimpering, shaking etc. We're trying a different place this time where I hope she'll get more attention and time with people. But it does mean I will be worrying about her the whole time.

Anyway, off to light up the barbie now. I might be complaining about this nice weather on Sunday but for the rest of this week I'm loving it. 

Last run is going to be tomorrow , 3 miles and then its time to rest up and let the legs recover for Sunday.

Bye for now.....