Have just seen this thread, which prompts me to warn about how dangerous running can be....
I used to run when I was at school and gave up when I realised how much more ground you could cover on two wheels (and then four). Later in adulthood discovered cycling, injured myself playing cricket and stuck to cycling rather than running. Any cross training I did was in the gym and on rowing machines.
A change of job brought me to an organisation that regularly entered 30+ runners into the Reading Half Marathon, so, not having run competitively for over 30 years (or at all for 15) I put on a pair of trainers and started off with a 2 mile loop around my suburb at the tail end of 2011. I trained for the Reading Half, was satisfied with my time and hung by trainers up.
A few months later Mrs CET, probably in an attempt to persuade me to cycle less, asked me why I wasn't running. For which there were plenty of reasons, mostly unprintable, but summed up by "cycling hurts less than running". However, in order to satisfy her indoors, I decided to do some more running and as a target entered the Basingstoke Half Marathon. This went in a time which I was more than satisfied with but, unfortunately, also convinced me that I was a reasonable runner.
Not one to do things by halves I decided I should fulfil one of those childhood goals and go for the full thing. The Reading Half, the Combe Gibbet (a 16 mile cross-country run) as prep races, and the Milton Keynes Marathon. The Reading Half was a new PB, the Combe Gibbet went better and the Milton Keynes Marathon was a disappointment as it took me 29 minutes more to do the second half than the first half.
Bored with running on roads, I entered the Clarendon Marathon which is an off-road event between Salisbury and Winchester in September last year and did a generally OK time, but found the off-road running much more entertaining than the road version, so have now entered the Sussex Coast Marathon with the joys of Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters.
So this weekend I ran 19 miles at some unseasonably early hour on Saturday as part of my marathon training and then rode 100km on the club run on Sunday. The rest of the weekend was doing chores to earn enough brownie points from Mrs CET to make up for the aforementioned training.
You have been warned....
And, in terms of improvements in my cycling. Its difficult to measure much change, particularly as after 19 miles running the day before, the CCB club run was more daunting than it usually is.
However, because it is something different, I'm probably more excited about the Sussex Coast Marathon than I am about most of the cycling events I've got planned this year.
