European Running Championships 2025 Preview

It'll be my road marathon 8 or 9 years, and in the intervening time I haven't been doing much running at all. I've been cycling a lot, I've helped my girlfriend build a house - but running wasn't really on the schedule.

Until the fall of '24, when I read that the above mentioned championships were coming to what I consider my hometown. Straight away a bunch of friends and coworkers were signing up and it seemed like a good opportunity to try and find my love for running again.

I started building up to 10km and running 2 or 3 times each week - Promising myself a new running watch (the battery of my Garmin FR945 had seen better days) once I could comfortably run 10km again.

Winter training

By the end of the year, my shape was on the way up but the actual marathon training still had to start. I had a training plan set to start the first week of January, but by that point the combination of cold weather, running in the dark after work and pretty stressful period at work, running moved to the back of my mind for a while.

By the end of February temperatures were still near freezing but I knew I had to get a couple of longer runs in to seen how my legs & feet handled that. I got a half marathon in on March 2nd and did 28km the week after that. On that Sunday it was 7°C but the sun was out in the full force for what felt like the first time this year. I arrived back home covered in salt and I had a mild sunburn on my neck. Later in March I ran another 30km and 21km again the week after that.

My legs felt good, my feet weren't really blistering like they used to on my long runs years ago - only my left hip was consistently feeling stiff and somewhat painful during running longer than 15km... Not a very encouraging sign but I could push through it without any lasting damage during each of my long runs.

A bigger issue is/was that other than my long runs on the weekend, I was doing maybe one 30 - 45 minute run a week - not nearly enough volume to properly train for a marathon.

It's one week out now and even though my training & preparation has been far from ideal, I feel ready to go. I've done this distance a bunch of times before - both when I was better prepared and when I got sick 2 weeks before race day - so I have a load experience to lean on, especially on the mental side. There will be lows, there will be highs and it's probably going to hurt :)

I also have 4 colleagues also running with 1 or possibly 2 targeting my pace/finish time, so it'll be fun to go through this with them. I don't have a target time in mind, finishing is all that matters.