Being drunk for three consecutive days doesn’t, after all, appear in the Hal Higdon marathon training programme. Damn, I must have misread it.
After a strangely hollow, monochrome day at work, when I was tempted to wonder if running had given up on me, I finished early, came home, and went out to run 9½ miles in a fantastic range of weather: a turbulent twenty-minute tempest sandwiched between two slabs of warm sunshine. Wonderful.
I don’t know why or how I did this run. It just… happened. Quite unplanned. But this was a vitally important run, yanking me back on track just as I was drifting away. I’m feeling suitably realigned.
A few weeks back, I said that we should remember that the marathon journey has a source as well as a destination. It was a kind of throwaway remark at the time, but it’s stuck with me. I get minor pangs of panic about the marathon in 40 days time, but it doesn’t help to focus only on the finishing point. When I started running 2 or 3 years ago, it took me something like nine months to drag myself from zero to a point where I could run for 30 continuous minutes. Throughout that deeply frustrating period, I must have dreamed of a time when it would be possible to get home from work with a lingering hangover, change, and head off into the tumultuous rain to run for 9½ miles without stopping. Followed by a normal evening without any bad residual aches and strains. That’s what happened today.
It’s possible to be too precious about progress. But it seems reasonable to allow yourself to be cheered by it from time to time.
