Can I possibly do it?

This blog documents my attempt to run a marathon under 2hours and 30 minutes, and to do so with less than 6 months of training. I thought this attempt deserved a blog, for the details of this plan are, to say the least, ambitious, to the point I don't know how realistic the whole thing is.

Here's the background. I'm 40 year-old, and by the day of the race I will be already 41.
I have two kids, and a wife, who exert the amount of demands on me that any other middle-aged dad experiences day after day.
I live in Australia, though I grew up in Italy.

I haven't run properly for a very long time, though I was a "serious runner" as a teen-ager (68.08 in the half-marathon, 32.00 on 10,000m track). But I have never trained "seriously" since then, by which I mean following a training plan, doing different workouts, not to mention races.

In fact, over the past 10 years I have been unable to run consistently for more than a few weeks per time. Family, work (I'm an academic) and bilateral calf-pain have taken the best of my 30s. No regrets, for I had more important things to do than running anyway. Now things are somewhat settled, I seemed to have worked out the issue with my calves (too much sitting on my ass), I can navigate my life between family and work. Of course, things can dramatically change in just a second, in which case I'll change (i.e. abandon) my marathon plan.

The idea behind this blog is to share my training ideas with other people, and to somewhat use myself as a guinea-pig. The marathon is in less than 6 months, as already mentioned, so it would not be inappropriate to call this a mission impossible. That said, easy things are not exciting, and there's plenty of non-exciting stuff already in our lives!

So, stay tuned.