Nagging voices (real and imagined)

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The battle between head and legs has started. I have developed another mental block on long runs and the really annoying thing is that it’s kicking in after, ooooh, a couple of miles. A couple of miles! Ridiculous. To try to get past this (and because he’s managed to nearly lop off the top of one of his fingers and can’t do his normal gym/training stuff) Ginge joined me on an after work long run of 10ish miles.

The negative nagging head kicked in after an unbearably short while at which point Ginge looked disappointed and nagged encouraged me to stop being a slacker. This lasted until I next ground to a halt when he decided to introduce a penalty system where I would have to do an extra 0.1 mile for every time I stopped. Apparently this was a carrot and stick system where the stick was having to do the extra distance if I stopped running and the carrot was not having to do the extra distance if I didn’t stop running; I still feel that I’ve been duped on this one.  To be honest, I carried on being a bit rubbish and there were little walking breaks throughout the whole thing.

On the one hand I know that this is a perfectly acceptable way to approach longer distances and I know that they weren’t the best conditions for me. I had underfed myself (salad is not pre-run food) (although Ginge had eaten the same as me and he was fine) (but I’m soft), it was a lot warmer than I expected and I was somewhat distracted by an impending stressful work thing the next day. On the other hand, I know that these are just excuses and I can do this if I put my mind to it and start to ignore the negative little voice that lurks in the back.

By the end of the run (which ended up as 10.5 miles because of route mismanagement rather than punishment) I felt as if my knees had been put on backwards and my aching ankles (caused by traipsing around Manchester over the weekend) were grumbling even more. All of this makes me suspect that a new pair of trainers might be in order. I was hoping that my faithful New Balances and the cheeky new upstart Asics Kayanos (that have tried to replace the NBs in my affections) might survive until October and then I could treat myself to a shiny new pair post-Royal Parks. Now I’m not so sure. I think that there’s certainly enough time to break in a new pair before the start line and the idea of running on bouncy new soles is rather appealing, but this wasn’t part of the plan. I think I’ll give my Asics a run out and see how they go over a distance. Or maybe think of a new post-race treat…

A marathon effort

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Last night’s Olympics-inspired take-no-prisoners attitude to trainin lasted until, um, this morning when we were woken by the swish of cars through puddles as the rain fell steadily. Then I remembered that the Olympic women’s marathon had been run in a downpour and none of them had melted (although a few didn’t took too impressed at the wet sponges that we’re being proferred at them by the stewards).

Of course the one thing missing from the marathon was Paula Radcliffe. I was sent a rather lovely infographic (that I don’t fully understand) that maps out her world record-setting London Marathon run in 2003.

Paula Radcliffe sets marathon world record; London, 2003

“This fabulous work represents an aerial view of the Marathon’s route and plots Radcliffe’s progression through London. The crosshair signifies the starting point of the race. Each kilometre is shown as a concentric circle in gold, growing in width the further along the route that point is. The silver markings represent the increase and decrease in Paula’s speed throughout each 5-mile split, whilst the gloss layer showcases the official 5-mile split times.”

My run was nothing like that and I did 8.5miles disturbed only by a thunderous tummy rumble of hunger at 3 miles. And it didn’t even rain that much in the end.

Awe inspiring

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Following complaints that I haven’t written anything for a while (apparently it’s the only way that my immediate family know what I’ve been up to – hello mum), last night I started to post about how my running has been a bit on and off recently because I’ve had (to use the technical medical term) ‘generalised wonkiness‘.

But then I watched the Olympic athletics on the telly and heard Mo Farah say that he runs 120 miles a week (and he’s not even doing Juneathon), which quite frankly made me feel a bit mardy for whinging that I’ve had a bit of a cold. I turn 33 next week, so I presume that I’m not quite the generation that the Olympic legacy should be inspiring, and I certainly didn’t expect to get caught up in all of the coverage, but I have. I sit and marvel at the human form – the women are basically made up of the same component parts as me, we have the same basic arrangement of skin and bones and muscle groups, but they’re just assembled so, so differently. The effort and commitment that goes into being an athlete (of any sport or discipline) like that puts into context the grumbling about getting out after work or resisting a lovely biscuit (she says typing with fingers made sticky by jam tarts).

And I love the fact that even though there’s all sorts of super-technology going into race kit, they still have to have their race numbers safety pinned to their fronts like us mere mortals (but somehow I doubt that any of them have had an over the boobs/under the boobs pinning debate pre-race).

So how to get into the Olympic spirit even more? Well, with a visit to Bradley Wiggins’s actual golden postbox with Stan the knitted pigeon, that’s how.

One postbox, one pigeon

Stan proudly adorned with his medal that he won in Aunty Freda’s button box

;

PS. Since my last post, I’ve discovered that the actual collective noun for slugs is ‘a cornucopia’ – I wish to register a complaint about this.

Feeling sluggish

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After declaring Sunday’s effort to be a bit of a disaster, I decided that I would learn from the mistakes that I made and this week make sure that I:

  1. Run more than four miles in total
  2. Don’t get led astray with lovely ale
  3. Eat properly before I go out
  4. Save my weights sessions for the days after long/fast/hilly runs

With the amount of walking that had crept into the last 3 miles of Sunday, I took up Ginge’s suggestion of considering that to be my 5 miler and do 8 miles tonight. Clean, sober and well snacked on half a bagel and a yoghurt, I’d done nothing more taxing than a big shop at Tesco yesterday and I set off with a spring in my step and Radio 4 in my ears*.

The spring  in my step lasted a couple of miles and then I felt hot, knackered and quite frankly disturbed at the sheer number of slugs that I was running around/across/next to. It was hideous. The warm and wet have made it a slug’s paradise out there (we came home from our holidays to find that the garden was mainly stalks and have had to raid the nursery for bargain end of season bedding plants to make it feel jolly again). Tonight it appeared that SlugFest 2012 (are we allowed to say 2012 or does it contravene some kind of LOCOG bylaw?) was being held in the surrounding fields and they were all en route to party – big, small, fat, thin, black, brown, orange, frilly, smooth – all oozing their slimy way across the pavement, only stopping off to gorge on organic matter of dubious matter as if they were calling into the motorway services on their way. Bleurgh.

I carried on (pondering on a good collective noun for slugs and settling on “a devastation”), debated turning back at 3 miles before carrying on and taking a couple of water/walk breaks every couple of miles. Annoyingly I know that a lot of this ‘need’ to keep stop-starting is in my head, so much so that there’s this little insistent part of my brain nagging me, going “you can do this, bloody try again on Thursday you slacker”. This part of my brain is clearly an idiot and so I am ignoring it. I have since taken some comfort in the fact that Ginge (who, professionally, is more inclined to know what is going on outdoors with weather and stuff) has informed me that (despite the rain that poured down before and since) the evening had been the warmest part of the day.

I am assuming that this would explain why I felt so hot, rather than it simply being a question of me being mardy. We shall see.

*Today’s Desert Islander of choice was Tim Minchin followed by a Play of the Week about a dying man who wants to be buried in his ex-wife’s garden, which wasn’t quite the laugh a minute that you might expect

Biscuits, Black Sheep and bicyclists

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My most recent Royal Parks Half newsletter was all about fuelling my training with good nutrition and hydration. The main point of this was to encourage us to buy lots of get used to drinking Lucozade Sport before the big day and I preferred today’s experiential learning entitled “what not to do”.

I warmed up by preparing to bake a batch of not-quite-ANZAC biscuits, which I suspect don’t have quite the nutritional value that I should be aiming for. It was probably a good thing that I couldn’t finish making these before I went out (a lack of dessiciated coconut in the baking cupboard) otherwise I might have replaced ‘running’ with ‘scoffing’ as my morning’s activity.

To clarify, occasionally I do bake something that isn’t make of butter, oats and syrup. Occasionally.

What today taught me is that a pre-hydration session on the Black Sheep whilst watching the rugby is ill-thought out preparation for a long run. To force myself out of the door today, I’d left my car at mum’s and planned an indirect route that I could round up to make 8 miles (rather than the 5.5 miles it usually measures). With hindsight, I should have stuck to the shorter version because I was flagging by mile 5 and run-walking half a mile later. With hindsight I probably shouldn’t have chosen the day before a long run to do my first weights session back at the gym and with hindsight my mileage this weekend has been pathetic so this was never going to be a roaring success.

Ah well, despite all this I quite enjoyed myself. Since the end of June, I’ve been running without music on my short runs, but can’t even contemplate a long run without something to distract me a little. Rather than tunes, I like using the longer runs to listen to the spoken word and am indulging in the wonderful Desert Island Discs archive (today was David Tennant and John Bishop) as well as trying to boost my IQ with the Infinite Monkey Cage and More or Less podcasts. As well as the pleasure of basking in the dulcet tones of Mr Tennant (no offence to John Bishop), I spied quite a lot of cyclists (including a team taking a break on their way from John O’Groats to Lands End) which put a smile on my face because next week the same route will be taken up by the awesome athleticism of Ironman UK competitors completing their 113 mile bike course. I must make it out to peer at them this year.