For those who have forgotten or, God forbid, didn't read the article, it told of my intense fear and trepidation at starting training for the Dublin City Marathon. I feel now, with a mere five and a half weeks until "Go time", it's time for an update.

I have never been particularly sporty. Like most boys in Derry I grew up kicking a football around the street but I had the added distractions of daily piano and violin practice to curtail my footballing exploits.

Maybe it's because now in I'm in my mid-20s, and realise that I am fast approaching my physical peak, but all the hours I missed out on running around like an overenthused loon is now being made up for. And then some.

In early July my brother-in-law challenged me to run the Dublin Marathon at the end of October. I accepted (how could I not, and still look him in the eye at Christmas dinner?) and decided to begin my training in earnest after one last hurrah and a week of decadent partying at a music festival in Spain.

After the holiday I went shopping around town for a suitable pair of trainers - my first in about 10 years - and was filled with excitement at the box-fresh pair I picked up. That was the easy bit, the youthful enthusiasm soon disappeared once I began to contemplate the long road ahead...

In the first number of weeks the training came as a complete shock to the system. Despite frequent games of squash and indoor football I had never really run for an extended period of time without it being interspersed with kicking or whacking something. Even then, it was usually all over in 45minutes and I had never before undertaken any single activity that lasted longer than four hours (except at university when we watched Godfathers I and II back to back).

On my very first run, the aches and pains were almost instant. The problem was that each ache and pain came and went with such frequency it was nigh on impossible to remember afterwards and seek suitable treatment.

First it was a tweak in the groin, then a tightness in my hamstring, then my achilles flared up and, finally, a dizziness came over me as I spluttered and stammered to a finish. That was all in the space of fifteen minutes! However, I couldn't let myself get too disheartened, not this early.

As I kept telling myself - whilst chuckling like a gack at my own, childish humour - it's a marathon, not a sprint.

I kept on day after day, week after week and slowly, but surely, I began to look forward to my evening runs.

That fighting spirit

On leaving work, I jumped in the car with my spirits raised and rushed home to get into my kit.