from Diary of a rubbish marathon runner I forgot to mention the most important thing about Thursday’s race. I used it to test my hurting ankle. I expected to have to grit my teeth as the miles wore on, and worried a bit if I would end up damaging the area even further. But I had bought an ankle strap a few days ago, and it seems to have made a huge difference. Not only did I manage to finish the race, the ankle didn’t even hurt. And while I can still feel it on a few occasions, the difference to last week is huge.
Since I had been training all the way through that race there was never a question of taking it easy afterwards. I just continued on with my normal training schedule, and since 15 miles were marked in on Friday, 15 miles it was going to be.
The most daunting task was to get up at 5:30 in the morning. Since I have been able to sleep in all through the holidays (apart from Christmas Day), I was no longer used to getting up in the middle of the night, and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the alarm going off. However, I surprised myself by waking up a minute before time. Unfortunately, that was as good as it got for the entire day. I ran at what felt like pretty decent effort, but the Garmin had me crawling along at snail’s pace. I do of course realise that the legs were tired from the race, but the extend of the slowdown surprised me. This became particularly apparent on the last 5 miles where I tried to put in a stronger effort, but only managed a very pedestrian 8:10 pace. Since I obviously still had the race in my legs this didn’t bother me, but I was quite shocked by realising just how much the legs were affected.
I was knackered when I got home, and the 5 miles cycle into work against the wind just about finished me off. And if I thought that the first day back in the office would be easy, I was badly mistaken. I had the most unpleasant experience of my entire career, which not only left me shaken for the rest of the day, it ruined my entire weekend as I spent the days brooding about the incident and the nights staring up at the ceiling. And I still don’t know how this will be resolved.
Apart from that, the runs over the weekend were a lot better. I took it reasonably easy on Saturday and was pleased to see some live returning to the legs. During the 8 miles I felt better with each step, which also helped to clear my head, at least partially. Today was even better. I ran a fartlek session, but this time I ran it the way I understand fartleks to be, unstructured, with surges and recovery jogs just like I felt. Again, I felt better with each step. During the first few miles I surged at about 7:20 pace and wondered how I had ever managed to run 7:05 for a marathon or 6:21 for a 10k just 3 days ago. But as the miles went by I felt better and better, and by the end I was flying.
A few days ago I noticed a painful red mark on my left side; the HRM chest strap must have rubbed against my skin, and I decided to give the strap a few days off until I can wear it again without discomfort. This is strange, I have used the HRM without problems for ages, and I haven’t got a clue why it started hurting all of a sudden. Despite being a numbers geek I can live without HR data for a while, I suppose.
2 Jan
15 miles, 2:07:08, 8:28 pace
3 Jan
8 miles, 1:03:28, 7:56 pace
4 Jan
10 miles fartlek, 1:13:59, 7:23 pace
Weekly Mileage: 84.5