When I think back, running the London marathon has been on my bucket list for a couple of years and I have been preparing myself physically over a long period of time on-and-off, starting literally from the ‘bottom up’ last year by first going to the podiatrist at My Foot Dr to get my feet checked and taking their advice to invest in a good pair of running shoes and padded socks et voila , I stopped running blisters under my feet.

Part of my preparation was then to run the 21 km race as part of the 2019 Standard Chartered Marathon, but by the time I got around to singing up the half-marathon was already SOLD OUT!

Enter Zoe with the great suggestion of signing up for the whole distance and then just stopping after 21 km. Brilliant I thought, until my competitive nature took over and I started to consider running the whole thing.

Happily I am surrounded by a network of practitioner friends, who although they thought I was crazy, offered to help get me marathon ready as far as possible.

On the physical front, the first thing to suffer were my knees – enter my physiotherapist colleague Kham Vong Lang, who amongst other exercises taught me to ‘stretch’ my knee caps and helped me figure out that I need to train the hip and butt muscles on one side to improve my running posture. The owner of Integrative Physio, Matthew Winter, also stepped in to help release my tight butt muscles and show me to stretch them properly, so I was able to run pain free and managed to do 21 km prior to the race without issue on a structural front.

One embarrassing problem that I did face along with many other runners is ‘leakage’ when I ran longer distances. My pelvic health physio colleague, Karen Edwards, taught me that this is NOT normal and neither is my coping mechanism of arriving somewhere new and making a mental map of where the nearest toilets are … When Karen first treated me we discovered that I was holding on very tightly, then she looked with the ultrasound and identified that the muscles had likely ‘spasmed’, which was subsequently released. The bladder diary she had me keep for a few days revealed that I was deliberately partially dehydrating myself to curb the urgency, as well taking in very little water during a run – not good habits when you are preparing to run a marathon in Singapore!

After a few sessions with Karen I am now able to run a considerable distance and hydrate adequately whilst running without ‘leaking’. She also suggested using a high quality ‘lube’ prior to longer runs to prevent internal chaffing, another invaluable tip.

With one day to go before the marathon another physio/practitioner (hopefully soon to be colleague at Integrative Physic), Claudia Tiberi, performed miracles by treating me to a gentle lymphatic drainage ‘massage’, noticeably improving the circulation in my legs. My colleague, Sue Parry, then put the finishing touches to my ‘coaching’ by giving me all important tips to prevent injury during the marathon and aid recovery thereafter.

What I love about working with my physio colleagues is that whilst they do treat, they also teach – you learn something new about how your body is working versus how it should work, as well as being given strategies and exercises to do on your own. Whilst it was quite a commitment to be diligent about doing the ALL of the exercises I was given and I am not always a good patient, I did notice what a HUGE difference making some small changes makes. So, some exercises and habits are now a regular part of what I would call ‘foundational preparation’ which will put me physically in good stead to encounter any physical challenge – be it a marathon or a city tour!

So with the best physical preparation for a marathon I could have hoped for, you would think that I would have been quite confident of going the distance, but there was still one snag that could have been problematic – I have been struggling with iron deficiency for years and even as a nutritionist I was struggling to boost iron levels to the extent needed for such a physical challenge.

When I noticed that I was loosing more hair again and was fatiguing quicker than usual, I went and had a full iron profile done including ferritin which confirmed that I somehow ‘lost’ all of the iron from an iron infusion a year earlier and was again iron deficient. For reasons explained in a separate post on iron, I was hesitant to supplement with iron or else have another infusion, so I focused on boosting iron absorption from my diet, hoping this would be effective if I did it properly.

However, upon retest at the beginning of November the picture looked even worse, as both my ferritin and my haemoglobin levels had dropped, in addition to which I did not have sufficient red cells or platelets in my blood, so getting oxygen to my cells was likely to be my major challenge and I was already experiencing shortness of breath at distances beyond 18km. It was a this point that I started to get worried and was even contemplating going into a hyperbaric chamber just to force enough oxygen into my body to ensure that I could go the distance.

Fortunately, with only 11 days to go, I went to an event hosted by SimpliiGood and learned about the superior nutritional benefits of their fresh, shock-frozen spirulina, as well as experiencing the great taste of it in the delicious, spirulina-infused food served to us on that evening. Thankfully, the aim of the evening was to educate practitioners in Singapore about the nutritional benefits and to launch this product in the local market, so I listened intently when the iron, protein and antioxidant content/profile where mentioned.

As a very experiential practitioner (yes, I am my own best guinea pig), I was thrilled to get a chance to talk to the Founder of SimpliiGood, Baruch Dach, and whilst I did bombard him with questions about the purity and processing of the spirulina, in desperation I also asked him whether he thought that taking their spirulina for just a few days might help me overcome iron deficiency to the extent that I might manage to run my first marathon without doing serious damage to myself.

Although this was an ambitious target he was very generous and confident in his product, replying with ‘let’s see, if you can take it in high enough amounts you should be ok’ and promising to have sufficient spirulina delivered to me the next day. So with 10 days to go until race day, I started integrating SimpliiGood Spirulina into my daily diet – all I can say (in this post, more in a specific post entitled Super-fuelled Me ) is that the results were INCREDIBLE, I did not experience shortness of breath once during the race.

So, the big question most are probably asking themselves at this point is –

DID SHE MAKE IT?

THE ANSWER IS YES

I did complete my FIRST marathon. Although I must admit that even as a nutrition professional who has completed a Master’s module in Sports Nutrition I made some fundamental nutrition mistakes which cost me a lot of time, so I only completed in 06:03:12, way short of my target time, dashing my hopes of time-trialling for the London marathon.

SO, WHAT WENT WRONG?

I made beginner’s mistakes:

1) I ate solids (albeit a salad) for lunch (more than 5 hours before the race), which hit my digestive system like a meteorite at kilometre 23 and had me stopping at every ‘facility’ for about the next 6 km. If you look at my time splits this cost not only significant time, but also involved the diversion of significant energy resources to digestive function, not to mention the pain and general discomfort. I almost quit and got on the MRT home.

2) Whilst I did make a healthier version of an energy gel (recipe below the pic) , which I believe was a saving grace, a gel was not something I had trained with nor was it a food source by digestive system was used to. I had been warned about introducing something new on race day, but I had also been told that I would like need energy from gels. Indeed, I did need energy from gels, but much less than was generally recommended, so I realised that I should have trained even with my healthy gel to get the quantity right, as a full 30g serving all at once made my pancreas twinge, plus I only needed 1.5 of my gels across the entire race to prevent me from hitting the proverbial ‘wall’.

SO WHAT WENT RIGHT?

1) Thanks to Kham and my other colleagues, I avoided overtraining and subsequent injury, whilst strengthening and building where necessary.

2) Thanks to Karen, I was not afraid of hydrating sufficiently and I took the glucose-free electrolyte formula mixed with a special ‘sugar’ (known to reduce the loss of protein into the urine called proteinuria) that I HAD trained with, in both pre-filled bottles as well as in sachets to mix with the water at water stations. I did also hydrate with normal water at the water stations, as well as taking a few cups of 100 Plus. Overall, I believe that hydrating well and taking strain off my kidneys was a crucial factor considering that it was inevitably going to be running next to a highway in a sprawling metropolis such as Singapore in addition to running 42+km in a tropical climate = increased toxic load for the kidney’s to filter + profuse sweating accompanied by lose of electrolytes + inevitable break down of muscles over such a distance = potential kidney meltdown. Whilst my urine was a chocolate colour just after the race, which may have been breakdown of damaged skeletal muscles (rhabdomyolysis), I did not experience the muscles pains, weakness, vomiting, confusion or irregular heartbeat that generally accompanies this phenomena, so I think it might have just been my kidney’s flushing out some excess toxins.

3) Thanks to Baruch and his team, loading with Simplii Good Spirulina even if it was for a mere 10 days prior to the race, not only increased my levels of stored iron, but also allowed me to increase my protein and antioxidant intake, so I started the marathon with ample resources to burn through.

4) Thanks to Claudia, the lymphatic drainage treatment shortly before the race itself ensured that lymphatic circulation was optimised not only allowing me to process unwanted waste and toxins more efficiently, but also strengthening my immune defences in the context of such a physical challenge.

5) Thanks to Sue, I practiced active recovery for a few days post marathon, which kept me injury free and had me back in form and running again in no time.

Whilst I would change some aspects of preparation, training and nutrition for the next marathon, just doing the 5 things above enabled me to complete my first marathon injury-free with minimal Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS-I was a bit sore the morning after, but it subsided by lunch time) and I was fully back in action, looking for the next marathon to run only three days later.

ENERGY GEL RECIPE*

MAKES 6 SERVINGS (1 SERVING = APPROX. 1 HEAPED TBSP @ APPROX 30G)

Ingredients:

• 60g organic soft dates**
• 20g Heavenly Organics raw neem honey (which I used) or Manuka honey
• 80g Biona organic brown rice syrup
• 2tsp organic white chia seeds**
• 1/4tsp Premier Research Labs pink salt (which I use) or Celtic sea salt or Himalayan sea salt
• 15g raw organic cocoa powder
• 1 tbsp of Wow Superfoods maca powder

Directions:

• Place all ingredients into a food processor/blender and blitz until smooth
• Let the mixture stand for 15 minutes, then blitz again
• Divide the mixture into small zip lock bags, approx 1 heaped tbsp per serving
• Press air out, zip the bag and refrigerate until needed

*Recipe adapted from Christine Bailey of Advance Nutrition

**Available at The Source