Dear Andrew,
There will be no problem for you to join the festive days in Copenhagen, because the royal wedding will actually take place on May 14, and not May 13.
Best regards
Annegrethe Høffner
H.K.H. Kronprinsens Hof
Chr. VIII’s Palæ
Tlf. 33 40 24 43
I’m sure the wedding was scheduled for the Thursday, so I suspect Annegrethe is being a little disingenuous here. Let’s just say I think they’ve been very decent about this.
Today’s a great day. It’s the day I finally felt well enough to get out there and have a run. Did I say I felt well? This tenacious cold seems finally to have given up the ghost, leaving me with just the hangover and lack of sleep. For some reason (probably not unconnected with the source of the hangover), at 1:30 this morning I hit on the great idea of watching Shawshank Redemption once again. It’s an uncontrollable urge I have two or three times a year. When I finally got to bed, at about 4 am, the second last thing on my mind was the idea of a run a few hours later.
At around 9 this morning, I found myself drinking 3 pints of orange squash, and peering through the kitchen window at a sort of biblical tempest. The downpour was impressive enough, but it was the gale rattling the windows that convinced me I should be out there, trotting round the streets with virtually no clothes on.
Not immediately though. Last night’s beer had me hovering on the very margins of insanity for a while, but once I finally made it through, around noon, I found myself with the long-forgotten problem of hunting for not very much to wear. Surprisingly, the sun had come out by this time, making it pretty much perfect running weather. Cool but bright.
The medicine was painful. I could barely get faster than an 11 minutes per mile pace. And I didn’t really try to. All I wanted to do was get some wind into my sails, and reacquaint myself with the outside world. About a mile in, I got a bad stitch which made me stop. But I tried out a technique I read about recently: strong exhalations through pursed lips, as though I was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. I was shocked to find it worked, and within a minute or so I was plodding through the puddles once more.
I decided not to push my luck, and kept the run to my normal 3.5 miler through the lanes and past the lake.
It feels good to be back on the roads again – and just in time. My rescheduled marathon means that the 18 week training begins two days from now. I’ve given some thought to which schedule to follow. Had I been running regularly over the past 4 or 5 weeks, I’d have stuck with the plan to do the Hal Higdon Intermediate. But I need to regain some fitness and work up to those long runs, so I’ve decided to stick with the tried-and-tested Novice schedule, but ramp it up a bit when I’m feeling fitter.
This week’s lesson: again, it’s kind of hard to have marathon training insights in a week when I’ve not done any running, so I’ll just create this electronic post-it note with a reminder to myself: Your training schedule is as interesting to others as their’s is to you.
Gulp. Better shut up.
