Life is frantic these days. It’s like being pursued by a gorgon, with each mini head yelling at me to get something done. It’s all happening.
What is?
Too much, you’ll be relieved to hear, to list and to pick over right now. I have a thousand things to do, including, now, at 11 p.m. on a Friday night, the need to pack for a party weekend in Yorkshire and a complicated business day in Nottingham on Monday.
But let’s get our priorities in place. I also need to record today’s long run, and I’d better complete the Oz Chardonnay that’s sitting in a state of… sort of semi-attemptedness, in the fridge.
I must be brief.
Before Christmas, I’d set my sights on a PB. I don’t think that will happen now. This isn’t false modesty, and it isn’t pessimism. Given the injury scare a couple of weeks ago, I’m truly delighted to be back where I am now. I’m very pleased to be running into double figures, and barring disaster, am as confident as I can be that I’ll do better than my last 2 Almerias. Last year I relegated myself to the 10K/13K, and the year before I was just very fat, and finished just a few places from the end.
Today’s run was dutiful; a box-ticker. I set out with high hopes, as I always do. Wore new shoes. Or to be more truthful, some old shoes, bought in 2005, but unworn until today. This may sound like the worst excuse ever, but I think I laced them up wrongly. Check out this web page. If you bothered to click that link, you’ll see that lacing a running shoe has something in common with the art of cat-skinning. Variable lacing? Fascinating: it seems to make sense. I went for the wide-feet option, as I, er, have wide feet. So I laced my brand new New Balance 854s in that funny way they suggest — missing out the lowest holes — and set off.
The shoes started attacking me about 5 miles in, and had redoubled their efforts by mile 8. Around this time, I decided to bail from the 13 or 15 mile plan. The feet were sliding a bit because (I am surmising) of the lack of tightness in the toe-end lacing.
Still 11.25 isn’t bad. Here’s my route:
As you can see, it was a nasty, urban meander.
Let’s step back 24 hours. Here was yesterday’s unposted entry:
A bracing 7.25 miles yesterday, starting with 2 or 3 miles along the canal before doubling back through a broken dog-leg of tranquil farm tracks.
Talking of dogs, at one point I had to wind through a farmyard, past a colossal hound with a throaty growl like a blown exhaust. Fortunately, the beast was tethered, or I may have experienced his Jaws-like set of pearly whites even more vividly than my dry throat told me I had on this occasion.
I won’t let Thing deter me from taking this unfamiliar route again soon. It’s good to find a new running option, or to rediscover an old one. I think I must have been down that way before, but a few years ago, late on a warm and fragrant summer evening.
My running routine is a bit confused this week. I’m away most of the weekend, so have decided to play safe and bring my long run forward a day, to tomorrow (Friday). I’ve even booked a day off work to deprive me of excuses. This rescheduling has had a reverse knock-on effect, with the usual Tuesday and Thursday jaunts becoming Monday and Wednesday.
So yesterday was my tempo run — or what I call my tempo run, even though the pace is probably what most runners would think of as a mild warm-up jog. 10:00 to 10:15 minute miling is about as good as it gets for me these days, and this is quite an advance on what I was managing when I got back on the road back in October. My average pace for the first few outings of that first month was over 12:30 a mile. Looking back at my SportsTracks stats, I seem to have knocked off a steady 45 seconds off that average for each of the months since then. I’m not sure how much more I can improve on that in the short term; I’m getting towards my historical norm for my current weight. I’ll need to maintain the delarding process to slip under 10 minutes as a standard average for these medium length runs. We’ll see.
