Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Unrecovery runs

Having spent the remainder of Sunday and Monday feeling slightly wobbly in the aftermath of a long run and probably not enough food (and possibly also courtesy of Young's Special, an interesting beer that has the property of causing hangovers without the inconvenient drunkenness part), I really didn't want to go for a run yesterday. This was partially because of the attendant aches and pains which were still causing me trouble, but mostly because I'm a big coward and was feeling sorry for myself due to the various blisters and grazed knees and so on I'm currently dealing with. In the end, though, it was fairly simple - no run, no marathon in a couple of weeks. I can't really afford to be lazy.

Off I trotted for the prescribed 9km - not very long, but a reasonable recovery run after 32km on Sunday. Even at a nice easy pace the first 5km were difficult and painful. I usually take about 5km to warm up anyway, and when combined with legs which still hadn't forgiven me for Sunday it was.. well, "interesting" is the word I should probably use, as all of the other words I can think of aren't polite enough to put on the World Wide Web. The route I was taking is not that easy on the legs at the best of times - the pavements of Long Ditton are heavily cambered in places and show every sign of being maintained by a council which considers facilities for pedestrians to be an unnecessary extravagance - but still, it really shouldn't have hurt quite that much. "Right", I was thinking, "that's it, just give it up, go home, withdraw from the race and enjoy your non-running trip to Denmark anyway."

Mercifully, things eased up enormously after my traditional warmup time, and the remainder was tolerable but slow. The first run after a very long run followed by a rest day is generally going to be fairly horrid anyway, but at least it reminded my legs of what they're there for. It 'll be interesting to see how they cope with today's 12km. The good news is that I've survived a hard week of training which most sensible people build up to over several months relatively unscathed (it was always going to hurt at least a little bit) and the training gets a lot easier from here until the marathon. The bad news is that 42km is still going to be 10km longer than I've ever run, which makes me a little uneasy.

Once again, we shall see.