Valencia Marathon

I did not know what to expect.

at all right that was my first time running a marathon but I did quite a lot of training before I mean honestly the mileage that I did before my first marathon I've never done ever again so yeah that was probably one of the things that made me more injury prone right but uh yeah after that first marathon i didn't really take a proper break and i think a few days later i started running again even though my legs were like destroyed yeah but and then you know i said the i said the next goal which was valencia marathon in december i was like okay now from february to december i'm gonna train even harder i'm gonna hire a coach now i can run under three hours of course right this is the next goal i mean naturally from 3 35 you go straight to sub three yeah

and uh

Yeah.

So I got to there.

Still a good bit behind Anna, but I was still a a good bit I think it was about 45 minutes I had a second which third sorry which is madness I think with that to be honest got to there then my pal Flynn he ran the next section with me so he in hindsight Flynn probably shouldn't have come with me he's got no experience he's not a trail runner he's training for the Valencia Marathon he didn't have any like he didn't have any of the what do you call it the required training race car, he didn't have any idea, he borrowed it off of Josh, just so unprepared, he didn't even know, on the southern upland way, he obviously followed the poles, I told him that, and he kept running the wrong way, I was like, Flynn, you're doing me in here, still going the wrong way, and he kept going a bit fast, because he thought if he goes a bit faster, it'll push me on, but you know what it's like, he doesn't know that distance, I'm deep into it, I'm happy to run, walk, jog walk if that makes sense whereas he's just trying to pull ahead of me all the time and he's talking to me and I can't hear him so I was getting frustrated with him lack of sleep just probably a bit of frustration that she'd pull away from me so much to be quite honest with you and then after that is Traquair in it is Traquair after that yeah yeah and then you go up the big hill so going to Traquair was running that same bit that i'd done my ankle so mentally i was like and this was in the dark again so i was really really focusing on do not do your ankle here again nearly done my ankle on a bit just before it see where all the kind of do you remember look where the bits i grab look there's big long bits of grass on the field and it's when all the sheep well that's when i raised it that's where all the sheep were the both times So I managed to get through that.

I was feeling good.

I put the tunes on.

His goal last year was...

He wanted to break the American record of the Valencia Marathon.

All along, it was, all right, Connor Mance is going to go for the American record in Chicago, and then...

Clayton Young, whatever target man sets, that's the one he's shooting for in Valencia, and he's not able to do that due to injury.

And you don't actually get this in road running at all.

The clicks for a comparison are more like, you know, the run club from Brighton went to Valencia Marathon and that's their group rather than it being a, Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I won't name any names, but like particularly I saw something like posted online about this beautiful, like highly polished, highly high quality, great images about an event that happened like just prior to the races.

So it's going to be really, really interesting to see how this all transforms and unfolds on October 11th, which is the Chicago Marathon.

I think what's really great about Clayton's story is that even though he went into the Valencia Marathon build, which is a December build, or it's a December race, it's in Valencia, Spain, he went into that build healthy, and then he very quickly got unhealthy.

And he had a really interesting injury where it was a nagging ankle injury that just kind of blew up on him.

And he had to take I think it was about 19 weeks of downtime and recover before he headed into a very short Boston build.