Tuesday was a very bad day. I was walking to the tube station after work when I came across an enormous group of spatially unaware German tourists, who were not only blocking the pavement, but the entrance to the tube as well. I stepped into the road to get around them, and as I stepped back onto the pavement, my hip socket screamed. I have no idea how stepping could do such a thing, but there it is. I limped to the tube, hoping that I could walk it off, but no. By the time I got home it was still complaining loudly.
Cue total meltdown.
I think after having a cold last week, and that really messing with training, this just felt like the final straw. I adopted an immediate policy of extreme RICEWSP: rest, ice, compression, elevation, wine, self pity. It was ugly.
But thankfully, it worked. Waking up on Wednesday I had slight stiffness, but no pain (other than a white wine headache), and ventured out for the missed run, which ended up being my best training run so far. It was hill training, which I can do by running up and down five avenues that run parallel to each other on a hill not far from home. Up First Avenue, down Second, up Third, down Fourth, up Fifth, and repeat in reverse. The nicest thing about hill running is that once you're then back on the flat, which I was for the final twenty minutes, it feels so easy that you just fly through it.
Shifting that first run to Wednesday, though, meant having to do my second standard distance run on Friday, which was a problem for two reasons: firstly, I never workout on a Friday night, and my brain and body both know it; secondly, it had bloody snowed. But nonetheless, I ventured out, keeping to a very very boring circuit along the three paths that had been gritted, managing four times round, about 35 minutes, before the surfaces started to freeze and my feet started to slip, and I had to call it a day.
And so we come to Sunday, this week’s long run, notable for being the last long run based on time rather than distance, a milestone I’ve been dreading. As I was supposed to be out for 90 minutes, I decided to do 2 laps of a 45 minute loop I’ve used before, and to be honest, I was so nervous that the first 40 minutes were mainly jittery, and trying not to run too fast – which may have actually happened, as that’s when I completed the first loop. But then somehow I seemed to calm down, any niggly aches and pains vanished, and I started to feel like I could keep running like this for a very very long time. And then, with fifteen minutes to go, my phone died – the phone that tracks my run and gives me updates. And I wasn’t wearing a bloody watch.
So I finished the loop for the second time, but knowing that I’d done the first loop in 40 minutes and that my pace was faster on the second, I knew I wouldn’t have hit the magic 90 minutes. So I ran through the university campus behind the park, hoping there might be a clock on a building, or that I could see through a window. Yes, really. And believe me, I’ve never been so happy to see an LED ‘IT Services welcomes you’ screen, complete with date and time, in my life. As it turned out, I’d not only run the required time, but 5 minutes over, and when I got home and plugged my phone in and did some sums, it turns out I’d run at least 13km, which means next week’s 10 mile requirement (16km) should be easily within reach.
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