Beyond 100 Marathons

There was only minimal time to muse on the travails of the Muscat Marathon before attention shifted to my fourth running of the Dubai Marathon.   Thanks to the Marathon being sponsored by my employer’s parent company – Dubai Holding – I would not be required to pay the race entrance fee, nor go and collect my runner’s pack (which would instead be delivered to my desk by a colleague).   Both of which were significant plus points.   I managed to get back into my usual training regime on the Sunday morning, two days after finishing the Muscat Marathon, and excitement started to build with a vengeance on Monday afternoon when I headed over to The Al Jalila Foundation in Dubai Healthcare City to film a promotional video about my 116 th marathon ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0OyrEILds0 ), which I was running for The Al Jalila Foundation ( https://www.hopasports.com/en/nicholas.turner ).   I am far from a natural in front of the camera but, after one false start, m...

The start of my 2019 running year carried on where 2018 had finished, with a reasonably heavy schedule.   The “winter” mornings in Dubai are cool (around 15 degrees) and dark (until around 7am), the former being great for running, the latter presenting a bit of a challenge to get out of bed.   However, by the time the Muscat Marathon was on the horizon I had managed to haul myself out of bed every day (the early bird may not catch the worm, but does catch some nice views of Dubai - see below) and was averaging just over 10 kilometers a day for the year – 179 kilometers in the 17 days of 2019 – and feeling relatively confident about my third running of the event.   Overseas’ events have become a lot easier and less chaotic with Gill’s organizational skills and flights, visas and hotels were all sorted well in advance of the marathon weekend.   The slight dampener on travel arrangements was that we were flying with Fly Dubai, rather than Emirates, which mean...