Your Marathon Your Physio: Marathon Training Diary

In this video, your marathon team physio, Lucy Macdonald, explains how to create a training diary for your marathon, the benefits of doing so and exactly what you should include in your diary. She also mentions the importance of recovery, rest and sleep. This video guides you through how to compose the ideal training diary. 

A training diary has many benefits, including motivating you to run, ensuring you recover properly, making sure you don’t get injured and ultimately it can help you to enjoy your marathon journey.

If you are interested in the course of videos Your Marathon: Your Physio please click here. 

Make sure you know how to make the most of her teams support and check out her video on running shoes here. 

Get in contact

You can contact Lucy directly on lucymacdonaldphysio@hotmail.co.uk, via this website (where you can also find lots of free running exercise videos) and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

If you would like to book an appointment, please click on this link.

Video transcription:

Hi, I’m Lucy Macdonald, physiotherapist, and today I’m going to talk to you about how you can create an activity diary for your marathon training and the benefits of doing so, and what you should include in that activity diary. I’ve just been talking to one of my runners about it and thought that it would be good to share it with you as well.

So, one of the most common reasons for becoming injured is that people don’t allow enough time for all the things around running that are so important in recovery and repair. It’s often not until you write it all down that you realise where you’re going wrong. What I would suggest you do is you simply get a piece of paper, here’s one I did just a few moments earlier, as you can see it’s incredibly beautiful. So, my runner that I was just talking to says that he’s going to share his beautiful spreadsheet with me so that I can share it with you in the future. But in the meantime, what you basically need is a piece of paper or a spreadsheet, with the dates or days of the week down one side of the piece of paper and along the top all the different activities that you personally do on a weekly basis. Now obviously there’s going to be a column for all of you with running, in there you’re going to put in the type of running that you’ve done on that day, how long it was and the intensity of your run etc., that’s the obvious one. You’re also going to include any alignment or running drill type exercises that you’re doing, like running man or any of the others that I’ve mentioned before. Any strength and conditioning, so that says S and C, strength and conditioning, any cross training you’re doing. These are more personal to the runner that I have just been talking to. Any swimming, how long he’s been seated for, because that can have a significant effect. Sleep is a really important generic one, so I want you to all have a sleep column on there, with the time and the quality, so how long you’ve slept for and the quality of your sleep. Other things, like you can see here we’ve got tv, gaming, we’ve got walking and we’ve got playing drums. So, any other things that are on there that are things that you enjoy, whether it’s reading or going out with your friends, hanging out with your kids, whatever. Anything that you do on a regular basis along the top. Then everyday you fill it in. Now what that does is it’s hugely motivating, you can stick it on the wall so that it’s there when you wake up every morning. It’s hugely motivating for a number of reasons. You can see where you’ve come from and where you are now in terms of the amount of distance, the time that you’ve been running. You can also really be your own coach in terms of all your recovery. Ooh, there should be a column on there for food, so what you’ve been eating, how much sleep you’ve been getting, anything that you know is important for your training should be on that chart.

As I say you can turn it into a fancy spreadsheet, you can use colours and pictures and all sorts. But having it up on the wall is very useful. It also means that if you do go through a phase where you feel like you might be overtraining, perhaps you’re injured or perhaps you’re just feeling fatigued or you’re getting recurring injuries, you can really look and assess yourself, or your physio can look and assess where it is that you’re going wrong with your training and recovery programme.

Hope that’s helpful, I know it’s simple but it’s often these simple things that make all the difference, so I hope that you find a way of incorporating that into your training.

If you have any questions by all means get in touch, you can email me on lucymacdonaldphysio@hotmail.co.uk or securely through lucy@octopusclinic.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, it is @octopusclinic that you want to follow. I would love to hear what other topics you would like me to cover, so please do drop me a message in the comments below or send me an email. And in the meantime, happy running!