It was touch and go that I would actually complete a whole week’s runs within a calendar week for only the second time this year, that earlier occasion being Week 2 of this program way back in March. The weather hasn’t been helping at all, and I missed the Sunday’s run on account of other domestic chores. The knee pain I have been experiencing hasn’t made its presence felt for a few days – it could be simply because I am taking precautions, I don’t bend this way and that, I don’t walk up stairs anymore. So I do not know whether it has gone for good, or just not manifesting itself for a while.
It has been raining pretty much all day for several days, and when I set out this Tuesday evening on the last run of Week 8, the pavements were all once again covered with sludgy leafy mush, even though it had just about stopped raining.
I therefore did not try and run fast. It was for 28 minutes once again, and this time I had got all my technology together. The watch was working and the headphones were working. I used a 156 BPM podcast for running music, and went off at a brisk walk for 5 minutes, and then started running. The first five minutes were exceedingly tough. I may have mentioned a few weeks ago, all the avoirdupois I have put on, and while thankfully I haven’t put on much more, I haven’t lost much of it. As early as the 3rd minute, I found myself contemplating whether this would be one of those runs I simply abort, walk the rest of the way, and leave it for another day. Even when I was thinking all this, I kept running. Huffed and puffed through to 14 minutes of running, when Laura rang the half way bell, when suddenly it became a tad easier. Not that I suddenly started enjoying it, but the feeling of having to quit sort of receded into the background. I was conscious of having overestimated the distance when I was trying to mentally track the passage of time on previous runs, so this time I deliberately underestimated it, so when Laura suddenly announced that only 5 minutes remained, I was pleasantly surprised. I was definitely happy when the run ended, and had the satisfaction of knowing that just one more week remained.
It is time thought to start thinking of the what happens after this. Contrary to expectations, I haven’t really started enjoying this all over again, in a minor victory of sorts, I have just been managing to put myself put there time and again, even though I am not liking it. I happen to know, it depends on a lot of my own personal circumstances, which I don’t feel comfortable yet putting into the open, maybe things will improve, maybe they won’t, I really need to be able, at some point in time, to separate my health from my other problems and tackle them separately with the individual attention they deserve.
In the meantime, it was still a run roughly in the same ballpark of performance as my other recent runs, if slightly slower, I still made negative splits.
Looking forward to getting Week 9 done in the shortest time possible.
cryptathon 