It's a marathon, not a sprint!

Pic caption: The view from the top of a small mountain we accidentally climbed on holiday in Italy.

So this is where it starts.
I've downloaded the training plan from the official London Marathon website, and I've spent all weekend looking at it, and it looks as hard this morning as it did when I first looked at it three days ago.
For the first time the enormity of what I'm taking on has really hit me I think.
What I mean is, there's loads of training to do. The plan has me running, jogging and fartleking six times a week.
It's obviously much more than I have been used to in terms of training for a half marathon, and I know it's going to be tough, but somehow seeing it in black and white on the page, makes it all the more daunting.
It's also a bit weird to think that if I just follow the instructions, I will become a marathon runner at the end of it.
But following the instructions is the hard bit, I guess.
A few things slightly concern me, apart from the amount of training involved, such as the way it keeps saying jog for ten minutes, run for ten minutes, then jog again. As if they are two different things! I've only ever done running, always at the same pace, probably somewhere between what they consider a jog and a run.
I tried it out at the gym on Friday, which by the way I nearly got lost in it's been that long, by altering the speed on the treadmill.
I managed to switch from a very leisurely 5.5km, my jogging speed, to 7km for running, which at the end of ten minutes was quite hard work. I can't imagine doing a two hour 'run', like what it says.
I think I may have overreached myself by opting for the intermediate level training plan.
The website gives you three options for their 24 week plans, basic, intermediate and advanced.
Having recently completed half a half marathon, and having run regularlyish this year, I felt confident that the intermediate level would be about right. Don't want to plonk myself in the absolute beginners class. But looking at it again, it may be more realistic to do the 'easy' plan, which I'm sure will be challenging enough.
As I say I went back into the gym on Friday for the first time in a while and it was okay actually, did about half an hour and found I sort of enjoyed it.
Starting the training at the beginning again takes some of the pressure off in a way, I can just do ten minutes here and there on the machines, a few ab curls and press ups and that's me sorted.
I didn't do very much training in Italy the week before on holiday, as you can imagine.
I felt like it was the last chance to have a good blowout before the abstinence starts. There's something quite decadent about popping into a restaurant for lunch and knocking down a bottle of wine for the hell of it, before getting ready for the evening's imbibing.
It was a lovely holiday from that point of view. And we didn't just sit around drinking all day every day. We took what we thought was going to be a romantic walk along the coastal path up to some beautiful fishing villages along the coastline of the Cinque Terre. But the path was closed because of rain, weirdly, so we decided to take an alternative route which took us inland and across a couple of hills.
Except these hills were more like small mountains and we spent hours scaling them as we had accidentally stumbled into a fairly serious hiking route.
We were dressed for a short stroll along the coastal path, not quite in flip-flops but just a flimsy pair of Adidas, and Amy with her handbag, when all these very serious looking walkers kitted out with Nordic walking sticks, stout walking boots, rucksacks with the kind of kit the A-Team would be jealous of and determined looks on their faces kept passing us.
About an hour and a half into the walk we realised we were way in over our heads when we had to walk over the hill, which was over 400 metres high, across the face of the steep terraced vinyards.
The path at times was little more than a foot wide and dropped away to our left down hundreds of metres of steep terrace leading down to some less than soft looking rocks.
I was scared, Amy was scared, but we both fronted it out, I couldn't let her know the fear going through me and tried to treat it like a stroll down to the shops. It wasn't until we got back down to the safety of a pizzeria that we confessed how scared we were.
It was a hell of a walk, over four hours and revealed some amazing views. But I think it would have been a more comfortable experience if I wasn't slipping and sliding all over the place in my sneakers.
It definitely worked off some of that pasta and wine though.
And it was good to enjoy it as I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to go on holiday again now, life for the self-employed doesn't really offer up great perks like six weeks holiday a year.
Mind you, it seems like the whole process of going on holiday is more trouble than it's worth.
I have to admit that we left our preparation to the last minute, as usual, although I did at least get my passport renewed in time.
But about a day before we were due to fly out I popped into Cribbs Causeway to get a few things, like sun cream, and I swear I must forget how much of an absolute con that stuff is because I'm amazed every time how expensive it is.
All I bought was a couple of bottles and some stuff for the face, and it was over £40! How?!? I did ask if there was anything in it apart from sun cream, like liquid gold. Apparently not. I suspect it wasn't the first time she'd been asked that.
Then I went to M&S because I felt I should probably get a nice new pair of shorts for my hols, just so I could look even more like a tourist than I was already going to.
I went into the vast hangar of a store and asked the first helpful-looking assistant I saw if she could point me in the direction of shorts and that sort of thing.
She looked at me, removed her spectacles, furrowed her brow and said "Shorts?", in a tone that suggested I'd asked for a sample of moon rock. "I don't think we have any shorts at this time of year."
At this time of year? Why the hell not? It was pretty sunny outside and I was in fact wearing a pair of shorts at the time. Why can't you buy what you want, when you need it in this country? Why does stock have to be so rigidly seasonal? It was only a pair of shorts I was after, but you'd think I was trying to buy fresh asparagus.
But despite all that nonsense, and EasyJet's best attempts at destroying Amy's suitcase by presumably letting it drop out the back of the plane onto the runway while the plane was still in the air, we did have a great holiday, and Italy was fantastic as usual.
Got back home and suddenly autumn is floating in the air and we are heading into that long and tedious run up to you know what.
So, no time to lose, I'm off to start my training plan.