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April showers.
A root canal run.
It’s 3a.m. I’ve been in bed five hours and yet to sleep a wink. I’m on that difficult adjustment period between graveyard shifts and early morning shifts. After just one day off from night shift (8p.m. to 6a.m.) I have a short transition shift before jumping onto early shifts (6.a.m to 4p.m.). The body clock just doesn’t handle these rapid transitions well at all, hence the sleepless night. Despite not starting work until 2 p.m. today, my plan had been to get up at 6.a.m. and go for a run. Well, it had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now after no sleep at all I’m beginning to hate the idea, indeed the whole concept of running is just beginning to feel a little loathsome at that moment.
And then the sound of heavy, drumming rain on the roof makes my mind up for me. ‘To hell with it’ I tell myself. I turn off the alarm clock and roll over, intent on getting to sleep and sleeping in until some reasonable hour in the (late) morning. Instantly, it seems, as if I’d muttered some magical ‘open sesame’ phrase, I fall asleep.
However, a strange thing happens. At 5:45a.m. I am again wide awake, the rain has eased, and a little oddly, I get up and go for my run anyway.
Now I should qualify what I mean by ‘wide awake’. It’s like the worst of jet lag – not just chain mail weariness, but that awful feeling of having been run over by a bus, or beaten up by a gang of hoodlums using telephone directories. It’s weird, and it’s awful, but such is working life on rotating round-the-clock shift work.
And so I’m on the streets at 6a.m. We’re now well into autumn and it’s still pitch black. It’s quite warm however, and the overnight rain has made it very humid. My glasses steam up instantly and remain so throughout the run. It’s the first of the rush hours and the streets are busy with commuters arriving en masse at the multiple train station car parks; none of them inclined to give way to lunatic joggers, not even at the zebra crossings. Running thus becomes a game of Russian roulette with steamed up glasses adding to the thrill.
'Thrilling' it is not, except in a macabre, maniacal sense. Everything aches, nothing works (least of all the brain) and I have no idea at all why I’m out there. If there are low points to one’s running life, this is definitely one of them. This is not only massively difficult, it’s also totally unnecessary, if not actually pointless and counter-productive. However, I have it in my head that I need to test out the leg, which after an altercation with a tree was rendered hobblingly painful for several days and curtailed any running, and so I’m out here now, I may as well see what I can do, little though it will clearly be. Even if I only manage 15 minutes, it will be enough to check out the dodgy leg and add something to the running log.
Instead of my planned 8km run around the suburbs I’ve opted for a few laps around the train station which gives me several ‘out’ points which, feeling the way I do, is the only sensible decision I’ve made this morning. Well, perhaps not so sensible, with belligerent motorists making road crossings hazardous, and a million people at the bus stops making the footpaths all but impassable. This really is a shitty, miserable run.
I do somehow manage something more than a quarter hour, but after 25 minutes and a mere, painful four kilometres I’ve had enough. I limp home, glad at least to have accomplished something.
In my experience there are two types of bad run. There’s the unexpected bad run, which always leaves me deflated and which makes motivation for the next run much harder to find, and then there’s the fully anticipated bad run, such as this morning’s effort. It was pretty much as horrid as I expected it to be. The benefit of this is that it actually does the opposite to the other sort of bad run, in that it actually makes me glad to have got it out of the way, and with the knowledge that the next run must be better. And so it’s actually quite motivating. Like a root canal, once it’s over, you quite look forward to the next visit to the dentist as it will be comparatively blissful.
I’m not really painting a glowing picture of our sport, am I? Never mind, I blame the shift work.
The next run though is going to be beauty. Just you wait.
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April showers.
