Hi 9 Milers, greetings from Australia. Completed my 3rd Marathon yesterday and 3rd time lucky. Finally broke my 4 hour goal. All my traditional runner friends thought I had no way near enough miles in the legs and thought I was crazy rocking up to the start line completely fasted. But the recipe worked again and I finished strong. Well the last 8km was very hard work to be honest but ran through to the finish and kept below my MHR the entire Run.

My Green Smoothie saves my day! Every single day over-and-over-again this green health bomb. With added Spirulina, BCAA's and Vitamin C. Matches perfect with your LCHF nutrition plan. You can find the recipe in the Mastery Program, step 3 'ESS', module 5 'recipes and principles 😋. This is the link: https://www.skool.com/the9milemarathon/classroom/b3346f2f?md=6ea3b570025741d6b7b1d8067b478890

This post is going to be ridiculously long. Reader discretion is advised ;-) Anyway, this is kind of a long story, but I hope you find it entertaining. I may well have been the first 9 miler, before Marlies even devised the plan. This is entirely by coincidence, as we were not in any way acquainted until after she devised the program. It all started back in the early 80s, when I was participating in something called the Presidential Fitness Challenge. The students in my school were challenged to do a certain number of push ups, pull ups, situps and various other challenges like the long jump, triple jump,100m dash and 600m run. In the little Massachusetts, USA, town of Georgetown, we had a board in the gym showing the school records for the various events. I knew I had little chance of matching most of these records, but I saw I was only a little bit slower than the record holder in the 600m. As I realized this, I slyly mentioned to a classmate, "Wouldn't it be cool if one of these record holders were a student who is at the school right now?" I was thinking about how it would be if I broke the record, but the classmate said, "actually, that guy who has the record in the 600m, Aaron Thompson, is a Junior." So, the very record I was trying to break was held by someone still at the school. I began training, running circles around the school's football field, and after one of the sessions, I met Aaron's brother, Erik. We chatted about my plans and I gushed about what an amazing athlete his brother was. Erik laughed at this and told me Aaron wasn't even the best athlete in their family. That was their little sister, Jenny. I never did break the record for the 600m, but I was hooked on running at that point. I trained hard the following year with a notion to join the cross country team since Aaron, who was also the team captain, was graduating and the team was going to need another runner. I began building distance, since cross country races were between 4 and 5k, much longer than the 600m. I even got the idea to build up to a half marathon, to be run on the day of the Boston Marathon.

We will let you know as soon as we start them up!

Was awesome to meet another 9 Miler, Kevin Lieschke, at the Geelong Half Marathon this morning. Wet, cold, and muddy but lots of fun! All my training lately has been at MHR so tried to stick close to that. Stopped looking at the watch at 16k and just went as hard as I could to the finish from there. Took one gel for a bit of a booster at approx 8km but didn’t really need it so didn’t take any more. Just water at the aid stations and plenty left to finish strong. Might not get to a Marathon this year but have another Half planned for September so might do a 12 week training block at HMHR before that for a bit of fun. Happy Running everyone and good luck to Marlies and anyone else doing Boston! Cheers Lon