Post-London: the rest of 2009

[marathondan]

The wheels came off for a little while there. A week of lost motivation, a week of heavy cold, a week of am-I-quite-recovered, waiting for the right moment to strike out again, resulted in three weeks of zero miles. Saturday night wasn’t exactly the perfect moment to strike out, but with an hour to kill before the England highlights I dragged myself out for 5 miles in the cool, still darkness. The second half was a little rough and ragged, but the habit was restarted – mission accomplished.

I’d been just on the point of introducing a tempo run, and thinking about taking the long run out to 10 miles, when my temporary aberration occurred. In fact, it was bottling that 10 miler for some reason that led to my short downward spiral. Still, no matter – onwards and upwards.

I still have a month or so to get into good habits before I really starting thinking about proper marathon training. As ever, less is more, so that will probably just mean two runs a week for a while, rising to three in November, then slotting into the usual Higdon training plan, hopefully a month ahead of schedule compared to last year.

Looking back at last year’s records, I’m astounded that I ran 10 times in November – we’d only had a baby in late August. I was getting by on about 5 hours sleep, and certainly not shirking my duties around the home… how was that possible? I guess it was a very exciting time of life, and we were living on nervous energy.

A year on, and life is remarkably settled and routine. And so it’s possibly even harder this year to motivate myself into getting out. But we all know how well the virtuous circle works, and hopefully this was the first step on the road to Brighton.