Tag: Running

Let me be a lesson to you

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Currently I am a cautionary tale. I have only managed two three mile runs since Thursday because I have been injured. I have in fact been injured by a settee. I wish I could say that it was an Acme sofa that fell from the sky with a whoosh and a sproingy clang, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t even moving furniture in a PG Tips monkey/Chuckle Brothers/Bernard Cribbins stylee. I was sitting.

I injured my back by sitting on a very comfy sofa. I spend a lot of time sitting – my working day alternates between sitting at my desk, in my car and in people’s front rooms – and normally I’m very good at it. Unfortunately on Wednesday, I was sitting and twisting so that I could talk to someone and it was just enough to leave me feeling slightly achy at the end of the day. The next day I started running with the intention of doing 6 miles, but quickly downgraded to 3 because of the niggling pain (even though it was feeling a bit better after a mile or so). It was fine for the rest of the day but at two in the morning it woke me up. I couldn’t settle. Every time I changed position I was rewarded with a few minutes of comfort and a false dawn of hope before the pain started again. By Friday I was a one woman Ministry of Silly Walks. Following the advice of my on-call physio (hello mum) I liberally applied ice packs and scoffed ibuprofen like they were Smarties (actually I took the stated dose) and didn’t run until Sunday when I managed another relatively pain-free three miles.

The moral of this story is look after your back all of the time – even when you’re not doing anything in particular. I’ve sat through any number of moving and handling training sessions and follow all of the rules when I’m moving something hefty, but it’s when you least expect it that injuries happen. When I was a student I went on an induction where we were encouraged to share back injury stories – I couldn’t tell you any of the work-related stories, but I’ll always remember the doctor who did his back in getting a piece of cheese out of the fridge. Sadly none of us dared ask what was he a man or a mouse.

This is what the NHS Choices website has to say about backs – lots of advice about avoiding injuries, exercises, yoga, posture and all sorts of gubbins.

Hello Dave, you are my wife now…

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I have been too busy getting on with (and enjoying) a week’s worth of exercise to actually write about it, so here goes with a quick recap. After a splendid weekend in London (where our food diary went something like; Mr Tickle jelly sweets, beer, piggy barmcake, beer, kangaroo burger, beer, beer, noodles, beer, noodles, beer, falafel, beer, pizza, beer, jaffa cakes) both Ginge and I felt that it was time for a week of temple food and committed exercise. I have been forced back into the gym to rediscover the fact that I quite like doing weights and I have discovered that necessity can be the mother of chilled out running…

Tuesday
I had planned to do a longish interval session, but couldn’t decide on what intervals to run. Because of my indecision, I ended up extending each running session by a minute and it turned into a longish pyramid interval session instead. Well it did for the first half… After a couple of miles or so I started to feel some lower abdominal pains, which never bodes well. Without going into too much detail, if this starts after a mile or so it’s usually a sign that I need to stop running away from home, turn round and make sure that I’m within dashing distance of a familiar loo. However, while I’ve been doing intervals and trying to pick up my speed, I’ve noticed that I get very similar pain when I start to run faster (I’m convinced it’s a combination of how I breathe and tense my upper body). The fun part is trying to tell which sort of pain it is.

I weighed up the fact that I was doing intervals against the fact that the weekend’s excesses had left my insides a bit confused and decided not to risk it. I turned round, abandoned the intervals and gently headed back. The pains didn’t stop. In fact they got worse. I walked for a bit. They got even worse. I had a growing sense of dread that I wasn’t going to make it home. I pulled up outside the slightly dodgy looking motel that I’ve gone past hundreds of times but never been in – they might have toilets near reception, I could just nip in couldn’t I? Deep breath, in I went – no loos. No signs of life. I followed the instructions for locating staff until I reached a door marked ‘Private’. Another deep breath. I tapped tentatively… Sounding like Hugh Grant* (“Um, excuse me, this is um very embarrassing, but I’m out running and ah, could I um, use your loo…?”) but feeling like Papa Lazarou (“Hello Dave, can I use your toilet Dave? Dave, there is a blockage in your toilet…” **). Luckily the lady was very nice, directed me to where I needed to be, I did what I needed to do and yelping “thank you very much” as I scuttled past the door marked ‘Private’.

The rest of the run was uneventful.

Wednesday
I went to the gym. I like the gym. They have proper facilities there.

Thursday
I fell asleep and declared it a rest day.

Friday
I took advantage of a late start at work to do an early but not too early 6 miles. The run itself was uneventful apart from the fact that it felt good, I enjoyed it and I managed to ignore the nagging voice of doubt that crept in after a couple of miles. Oh, and I ran without tunes. Normally I would have my shuffle on for anything more than three miles, but I couldn’t find my earphones and I was feeling reckless so off I went with only my thoughts for company. It turns out my thoughts are mostly weird and a large chunk of the run was taken up with thinking about advanced directives and what decisions I would want making if anything happened to me and I lost capacity. Cheerful. It did occur to me that it would be ironic if this was the run, without tunes and whilst thinking about such things, that I would get run over by a bus. Thankfully I wasn’t. I did see some swans though.

Saturday
Another self-declared rest day. I knitted.

Sunday
Long run day. I wasn’t sure if I was looking forward to this. On the one hand, I’d had some good runs during the week and was enjoying myself; on the other hand, what if I couldn’t do it? For once I’d put some thought into making sure that I was well prepared – a good carb-loaded tea the night before, only a small glass of wine, water before bed and when I got up, oats eaten an hour before setting off, water bottle filled. I had no route planned, other than turning right at the front door, left at the end of the road and then running 10 miles. After about half a mile, I realised that I had left my carefully filled water bottle on the kitchen table. Arse. I tried not to panic or give up and plodded on. This decided my route for me – rather than go a way that I find difficult at the best of times and has no escape routes, I went for a loop that could be 6.5 miles or it could be extended as much as I want. I plodded on, ignoring the dark grey clouds gathering to my left and listening to clever Radio 4 people talking amusingly about intellectually challenging things. Just over halfway, the heavens opened – I plodded on, actually quite grateful to be hydrating one way or another. At 6.5 miles, I plodded on with my extension loop, pausing at 8 miles to consider my route, before turning round and heading home, cold, wet and very pleased with myself.

The lesson of this story is that I seem to have an awful lot of comfort blankets in the form of routines when I run, some of them might be useful, but as long as I have me and my trainers I’m mostly ok.

And I hesitate to say this, but I think that I might have got my running mojo back!

*But not looking like him, unless he’s become a sweaty, red-raced blonde

**I hope that all of you familiar with the League of Gentleman are doing the voice. If you didn’t, go back and do the voice. Go on. You know you should.

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…

J minus 3 days

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Like an angry badger lurking in a nearby hedgerow, Juneathon is waiting and ready to pounce. I am responding by going “la la la la la la la” with my fingers in my ears and my eyes shut. I have considered tearing June out of the calendar in an attempt to bypass the whole thing, but I suspect that this wouldn’t work and it might muck up the whole wibbly wobbly timey wimey thing.  Anyway, I’ve booked my train ticket for the Juneathon picnic and the Queen of the Athons has a very much zero tolerance policy for slackers (no Juneathon, no al fresco dining in the park), so it looks like I’ll be doing it again.

Anyone who has done one of the Athons will confirm that exercising every day is the easy bit, the challenge is to blog about something vaguely interesting every twenty-four hours. This Juneathon, I have a plan… I’m going on a treasure hunt.

What I would like is suggestions of thirty items treasure that I can find on my daily runs – things, concepts, stuff – and I’ll somehow try to incorporate one into each day’s blog or photo. This may turn out to be a ridiculous idea, but then it’s probably no more ridiculous than signing up for Juneathon again.

If you would like to suggest something, add a comment or send me a tweet (@knittingpenguin) but please bear in mind that I will be  doing most of my running around rural(ish) Lancashire, except for the nine days of my ten day holiday in (proper) rural Kent.

Oh, and Ginge has just declared himself Keeper of the List, apparently “so you can’t cherry pick the easiest ones” from people’s suggestions. I don’t think that I like that part…

Racing again – Port Sunlight 10k

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Does anyone read this for up to the minute news about what I’m up to? I really hope not.

Not last Sunday, but the Sunday before was the first ever Port Sunlight 10k and I ran it. Not only did I run it, I was proper looking I think it was a combination of the fact that it was a brand new race and that they sent safety pins out with the race pack, but I had a feeling that it was going to be a lovely one. In fact, how can a place called Port Sunlight be anything but lovely?

The soft mist of spray on the breeze was very welcome

Port Sunlight was built by Mr Lever (of Lever Brothers fame) for the workers at the Sunlight soap factory. What makes it wonderful is that he commissioned thirty different architects to design the houses, meaning that there is an incredible mix of styles of housing – in fact the village has an amazing 900 listed buildings within its 130 acres. This was always going to be a bit different  to running along Blackpool front.

It’s a bit posh round here

When my safety pin filled race pack arrived, the first thing that I did was look at the course. The second thing that I did was start panicking that I was going to get lost. It’s a two lap race that goes round the village in a sort of complicated figure of eight – I tried to trace the route by following the arrows on the map, but kept ending up at the start point without going around the top half of the eight. Sensible logic told me that (a) there would be marshalls and (b) it was highly unlikely that I would find myself at the front of the pack yelling “tally ho chaps, follow me….”.

Even though my training continues to be unfocused and erratic, my enthusiasm for the race had me convinced that I could pull a decent performance out of the bag. It turned out that whilst a positive mental attitude is important on raceday, it cannot replace sweaty hard work out on the pavements. Whether it was a bit of sunshine, thinking too hard about what I was doing or a lack of actual training, I did find it hard going and although I was happy with the first half, I slumped between 5 and 6km and found it hard to get going again.

Strictly speaking, this is mostly the queue for the loo rather than, say, the start line

The race itself is very friendly – lots of local runners from the village and lots of people standing outside their houses cheering on people they know. The looped route made it quite spectator friendly and the sight of Ginge popping up when I least expected it was a welcome bonus. My other spectator highlights were a girl playing the spoons and the lady who yelled “come on, no slacking” at me as I shuffled past her front door. The marshalls were plentiful and supportive – on the second loop “this is the last time that you’ll pass these marshalls!” kept me going for a stretch. There was a good mix of club runners (to the chap in full compression gear – I salute you and can only imagine the ‘flub’ sound that would accompany me taking off that amount of tight lycra), mid-level runners, beginners and a bloke who was running proper barefoot. All in all it was a good morning out, even if my time wasn’t the best I’ve ever managed.

My lesson learned is that if I want to get a bit faster, I’ll have to have a bit of focus and as such I am embarking on a plan to shift my arse into gear. Luckily it’s nearly Juneathon…

Drummers – a guaranteed pickmeup