Life can scupper training plans - cut yourself some slack

We're just a little more than three weeks out from the marathon, so hopefully the heavy lifting is nearly done for most people.

Regardless of the level of preparation, it’s only natural to doubt yourself. I’m the same as anyone else, you wonder could I have done more?

The thing I try to tell people – and myself – is to cut yourself some slack. Of the 22,500 entries for the race, only a very small group are professional. The rest of us mere mortals are recreational runners and life will always throw up obstacles for marathon training.

Given where Dublin falls on the calendar, much of the training is done through the summer months.

That’s great in so far as the days are longer, but the flipside to that, is that if you have kids, they are off school and there never seems to be a shortage of sports and activities.

With work I travel quite a bit during the summer and you are trying to factor all of that in as the marathon is approaching.

One major lesson I have learned from last year is a more relaxed approach works better.

No week, or even day, is the same for me work-wise, so I need to be flexible. If I’m working on a Saturday, I’m thinking can I get my run in on Friday instead?

Last year I was probably too rigid with the training plan.

There were Saturday mornings where I took the kids to training or a match when I was coaching their football team. I would get up at the crack of dawn, get the long run in, I might not have had time to change or rest post-run, hopped straight into the car to wherever we needed to be.

I’d be standing on the side of the pitch, wrecked, not able to give my best for the kids and also not recovering properly. As a result, it took a lot longer to recover and I was compromised for the following day’s