You have to wonder about all this "running is good for you" stuff. Most of this log seems to have been a description of ailments and pains. This evening saw all the usual ones, along with a reawakening of Sunday’s blister, plus a strange ache at the top of my spine. To top it all, I actually fell over.
I was on a short stretch that runs alongside, but in the shadow of, the main road. It’s a steep bank up to the road, and the streetlights don’t penetrate down there. In the darkness I stumbled on a big lump of tarmac that just appears for no good reason on the path, and down I went.
No physical damage beyond a superficial graze to my knee, but it shocked me, and I had to stop for a minute just to calm down and rewind. It’s only the second fall I’ve had while running. The other time was taking a short-cut down a wet grassy bank and ending up sliding down on my arse.
Apart from this excitement, it was the usual 3 mile Tuesday. the usual 37 minutes. And it was dry, though that didn’t prevent me from finding two filthy puddles to splash through. The weather has been abysmal recently — though on reflection, the wet is preferable to the cold.
There’s something a bit gloomy about Britain at the moment. It’s as though we are all waiting for some calamity to happen, and we’re filling in time and having a bit of a warm-up with a few strikes and a splash of dismal weather. I don’t know what it is but there’s been a sense of unease since Osama-geddon. We don’t talk about it but there is a sense of foreboding around the old place. It’s good to get out and run and forget about all this. Except that running is a perfect opportunity to think about it all of course…
Last night I entered the Reading Half Marathon on Sunday March 10th. I had toyed with the idea of going for the Watford Half this Sunday as it coincided with my scheduled 13 mile long run, but decided against it. The impression I picked up from a couple of enquiries was that it was a pretty tough race, and entrants were "expected to reach 11 miles in 2 hours", which is beyond my realistic capability at the moment.
Instead I’m looking at Reading followed perhaps by the Hastings Half the week after and the Worthing 20 miler the week after that. It sounds like a horrendous schedule when listed like that but the training programme I’m doing calls for 18, 14 and 20 on those three Sundays, so to run those races would actually leave me 6 miles short. The week before that is supposed to be 12, so perhaps instead of doing 12, 18, 14 and 20 I could do 18, 13, 13 and 20, which amounts to the same.
On the other hand I might have given up by then….
