Some people like to run with their dogs. An interesting way of staying
motivated. I’m thinking about buying a tortoise to tag along with. Help
coax me out of my comfort zone.
Progress is slow, but there is progress. I was out again at 7 this
morning, turning in around 4 miles. Again, no walking. I seem to have
emerged from that phase. It’s horribly slow; still well over 11 minutes
a mile. More like 11:30, in fact. But it’s 4 miles without a break, and
that’s a good sign that I’m slowly starting to build up some endurance
again.
At the moment I’m sticking to the party line — I’m doing the Two
Oceans 35 miler,, and plan get round within the 7 hour cut-off. But
somewhere at the back of my mind is the teasing knowledge that there is
a Two Oceans half marathon as well. I’m not yet thinking about it as a
strong possibility but I’m glad it’s there as a fall-back. I’ll carry
on as I am, but at some point before the end of the year I have to
rediscover reasonably comfortable double-digit long runs, or it will be
time to sit myself down and have that tough conversation.
I need a change of long run scenery. Did running up and down the canal
ever have a sparkle? I think it must have done, but it fell off on some
marathon campaign somewhere. I plodded along it again for a few miles
on Sunday, thinking that life must have more to offer than this.
Glittering in the wintry sun, the canal was as lovely to look as ever,
but the soft uneven path saps my physical strength, and the
out-and-back nature of the run drains my enthusiasm. To run somewhere,
then turn round and run back the way you came, seems to encapsulate the
essential futility of the human condition. It becomes a simplified
model of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. And I
know precisely what I mean by that, so
just back off.
Looks like I’ll need to drive somewhere to run long. Getting into the
car to go for a run goes against the grain, but it’s time to rediscover
the cold thrill of going long, and the excitement of exploring a new
route. When I was training for that first marathon, my weekdays were
coloured by a febrile sense of fear and glee. The long run was the
fulcrum of the week. I’d spend half the week being amazed at what I’d
done the previous Sunday, and the second half panicking about pushing
it another mile or two the following one. Let’s have that again. Time
to reinvent the LSD.
In a rash moment a few months ago I did suggest to Sweder of this
parish that I’d go down to Brighton to join with one of his famous
hillside lopes, but the more I read about those craggy monsters, the
more frightening they sound. And that’s just the runners, not the
hills. Safer to stick to my lonely Berkshire dominion for the moment, I
think, though I need to find some road less travelled.
