Since the last entry, another furious gym session, raging against the step machine.
More significantly, today, 7.2 steady country miles.
I waited till my attention-seeking computer was whirring and grinding. It’s become self-important — a recent habit that doesn’t please me.
I made a dash for it. It was mid-afternoon and mild. How liberating, and how promising, to be able to run in just teeshirt and shorts again. Was this the first breath of spring? I hope so. We need hope.
Despite the kindly temperature, a gentle rain fell, and beneath a colourless sky I headed off towards the canal, and onto my extended round-the-block route.
This is the one that takes me off the towpath after 3½ miles and onto a long, straight enamelled path through the flat Berkshire farmland. I like this route. The canal is always a pleasure: no people, no cars, no noise, no pressure. There is just one nasty explosion in the serenity — as I leave the waterway and cross the A4, but within minutes I’m back to the calm of the farm road.
It’s the road that takes me through the farm with the gargantuan canine, mentioned a few weeks ago. This time he had snarling duties elsewhere. In his place, a dozen very fine racehorses being led around the yard, and emerging from, or disappearing into, horse boxes and vans decorated with the names of stud farms. Fine human fillies aplenty too, beaming and waving at me as I passed between them. I beamed and waved back. A delicious slice of English country life to winch the spirits.
It was supposed to be a tempo run, but I decided (insofar as one makes conscious decisions about these things) that I should aim for distance rather than speed. If I’d gone for the latter, there was every chance that I’d have ended up with neither. So I took it gently, aware that I was still clawing my way back to the sort of confident, sinewy running to which I’d started to feel entitled before fate lobbed a couple of spanners in my direction. It will take a while. I could still feel a wobbliness in my legs, but there was much less of it than there was on Sunday. And there will be even less next time out.
Rest day tomorrow. Instead, 5 or 6 hours in the car, around 6 or 7 hours in Nottingham. Oh joy. It will be a long and possibly difficult day. Another therapeutic bite of rural England on Friday will be just the thing to make it all better again. As we like to say round these parts, running is the answer.
Believe me, it really is.
