I called my elderly mother this evening. “How are you?” was my innocent
question. Pause. “I looked in the mirror today”, she said, ” And I saw
Death staring back at me….”
Maybe she’s been a closet Tottenham fan all these years.
It’s been a wretched week. I’m ill. Or something. My back has been
aching all week, I have a rash across my chest, and my stomach sort of
hurts. Headaches, dizzy spells, feverish. Extreme inertia, even by my
trail-blazing standards. And an itchy wrist….
Itchy wrist? Yes, itchy wrist. Only one of them however, so it could be
worse. An optimist sees the doughnut, the pessimist sees the hole, as I
heard someone say today.
God knows what I’ve got, but I thought it best not to add to my
mother’s worries by mentioning it.
It’s not done a lot for my running career. I was supposed to set off
once again on Monday, but my back had started aching at this point, so
I thought it best to postpone the relaunch. At the time I put it down
to the excessive excitements of the previous day. A frustrating match
at the Madejski, watching my team go down to a dodgy penalty, followed
by an increasingly wayward meander round the local beer festival.
But it hasn’t gone away, and I’ve gone on to collect these other
symptoms.
Here’s how bad it was — I didn’t even make it to the pub to watch the
final day of the Premiership season. Instead, I twitched in bed all
afternoon, listening to TalkSport, which I always think of as the
provisional wing of Sky TV. But they told me what I needed to know, and
when the news finally filtered through from Highbury, that Arsenal had
got the final Champions League place, and Tottenham hadn’t, I was able
to sleep a bit more.
So I’ve done no running this week at all, though I’ve tried to make up
for this by devising a plan. Ah yes, a plan. Always a good alternative
to action.
The plan involved reading John L Parker’s book about Heart Rate
Training. I was tempted to be disappointed by its Dummies-like
inanity, but decided that this was better than something with
anatomical line drawings and a tedious excess of explanation. At least
it ensured that I read it.
There was some discussion on the forum
a while ago about heart rate training. My own missed a beat when I read
it. We chaps at the back are always on the lookout for the silver
bullet, that which will transform us not into elite athletes — that
really would be asking too much — but into just ordinary runners.
Y’know, a 4:30 marathon; a 2 hour half. The heart rate correspondence
offered that possibility, and shortly afterwards I snapped up one of
the new Garmin 305s with built-in HRM, though I decided to postpone the
heart rate stuff till after Zurich.
So this is my new initiative, once I get back on the road. It’ll be a
long haul back to fitness, but I’ve already made a plan and decided on
my first target, though it’s a pretty daunting one.
To get out of bed.
