So what’s gone wrong?
As usual, my stupidity has turned an enforced break into something much worse. Last weekend I was in Manchester, enjoying too much Champagne and Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, and barbecued animal. I returned without a weekend long run to log in my spreadsheet, and with extra corporeal ballast to lug around the mean streets of West Berkshire.
That was bad enough, but worse was a painful toe that gave me the excuse I needed to take a few days off. This was then compounded by a dose of man-flu that no one has been very sympathetic about. Huh!
Man, it’s so comfortable in this swamp. It’s warm and moist and green and comfy, and you meet interesting creatures here. They even have a bar with beer and wine and crisps and cheese….
But hang on, I’m sinking…. Help! I’m sinking I tell you…! Help!!! …….HELP!!!
gloop — gloop — glurrupp!
Most of us seem a bit down at the moment. Inertia oozes from these pages. Why? I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to shake out of it, and fast. I recently updated my profile on the Runners World website, changing the answer to the question of how long I’d been running, from “1-5 years” to “5 to 10 years”. This reinforced my suspicion that I’d been doing this for quite a while now. Long enough to have been here many times before. Long enough to know that every marathon campaign has the odd down week. As the well-known observation goes, don’t judge on whether someone has problems, but on how they respond to them.
Bear with me.
