I’ve bent over backwards to try and improve my stretching techniques, but I still don’t feel as supple as I’d like at this stage of a marathon training schedule.
I keep looking at the figures in my spreadsheet, trying to make sense of the apparent fact that I’ve managed a perfectly respectable 29 miles this week, yet still feel unfit, undertrained and, like Marx’s proletarian hero, in a state of perpetual struggle.
I suffered a nutritional calamity on Saturday, having been lured to a posh Sussex eatery by my wife’s aged aunt. There I was ambushed by an Everest of roast beef and roast potatoes, followed closely by a dangerously shifting pyramid of apple pie and custard. It took a full 24 hours to recover sufficiently to go running.
It was worth the wait though. Yesterday I ran 9.4 miles. Or let’s say I travelled 9.4 miles under my own steam. The hot and exhausting return leg of the expedition to the drinking tap at the Kennet & Avon Visitor Centre at Aldermaston was studded with brief walk breaks, partly to admire the clumps of fluffy grey cygnets clinging nervously to Mother Swan, and partly because I was knackered. My only adventure came when I approached an angler who had a very long fishing rod laid across the path. Just as I was about to skip over it, he shouted “Hang On! Better safe than sorry!” He then began rapidly pulling the rod out of my way. “Don’t worry”, I called back, “I think I’d have been pretty safe”. To which he replied: “I don’t give a fuck about yooo, mate, it’s this rod. If you damage it, you’ll owe me a lot of money.”
He was serious. I was so pissed off with him that a few yards further on, I picked up a sizeable rock and lobbed it back into the canal next to where he was fishing. “OY!!! YOOOOOO!!!” What a cry he let out. I just legged it, happy in the knowledge that he’d never catch me, and that I’d frightened the fish away from his valuable fishing rod for a while.
Even if slightly fragmented, and not fast, it was good to get 9½ miles under my belt – my longest plod since the beginning of April.
