Audacious April.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

The leftist forces of General Patella finally came to the negotiating table and we reached a truce late last night. This leaves me able to do long runs again, albeit at a slightly slower pace, but the main trade off is to cancel all thoughts of a marathon this year, and instead concentrate on more hill work and a more modest and slightly slower weekly mileage with a view to a good performance in the Point to Pinnacle hill climb in November.

This truce finally came about after several days of aggressive RICE action which subjugated the left knee and had me in a good position to argue for a decent long run today, and thus rescue my weekly schedule which had fallen well short.

And so this morning all felt good. Whatever the mysterious ailment was that left me so buggered the other day had vanished as mysteriously and as quickly as it had appeared, and with knees and things in good order, I was able to load the mp3-thing with suitable long run music and head off for what I hoped to be a good 2 hours+ run, with an opt-out clause at 16km, which was the minimum I wanted to cover today.

16km came and went with barely a blip, so I pushed on and finally covered a half marathon distance in pretty comfortable fashion, thus rescuing my weekly schedule from the depths of despair. Certainly not fast, but a good distance in a reasonable training time, comfortably done with negative splits and it puts me well back on track. It felt great then, and it still feels great nearly twelve hours later.

I still need to log a few weeks of this base mileage before beginning serious hill work, but it's looking good now. Finally I am beginning to feel like a runner!

Distance: 21.1 km
Time: 2h26m
Track du jour: Ike & Tina Turner's Nutbush City Limits - a great song with a beat smack bang on my LSD cadence.