As well as showing you just how gross the human body can make itself look after 26.2 miles of running, how many ways it’s possible to hurt and how fast it’s possible to consume that post-race meal, marathon training can teach you another valuable lesson.

In the first few weeks of marathon training the main panic is along the lines of “How many runs a week? Plus strength training, and cross training too? And you expect me to stretch after a run? Have they invented two more days in the week that nobody has told me about?”

Over the coming weeks things drop off your schedule – like personal hygiene or sleeping or remembering to collect your kids from school (luckily I don’t have any of these). Maybe really important things like watching two hours of Fraser re-runs every night or updating your Facebook status every half hour drop off too.

But generally you muddle your way through and find ingenious ways to squeeze in your training. I now can’t brush my teeth without doing one-legged squats for example.

Recently I read a blog by pianist James Rhodes entitled ‘Find what you love and let it kill you’ in reference to a Charles Bukowski quote. Rhodes writes that after we account for all the essential things we have to spend our day doing “We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want.

“Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can’t even smoke?”

He urges us to, instead, spend that time pursuing whatever it is that you want to become – an artist, a writer, anything, but something. A marathon runner? An iron man? To spend you time chasing down things that will leave you saying ‘I did that’ instead of ‘I wish I’d done that’.

If you’re spending a lot of time on Facecrack or Witter, you might like to give this a try and turn everything off for a week.

Last month, I sent those who subscribed to my Autumn Marathon emailer last year, a time audit sheet. The idea is that you record what you spend your time doing for a whole week and then you look at where you can spend less time doing some things and more time doing other things.

Training for a triathlon has left me with very little time to do important stuff like sit in beer gardens or wash up. I’m sure there’s a few hours in the week that I’m overlooking. I’m keen to find them.