Being Logical

I'm a runner. If you didn't know that then you've either not been paying attention to your Facebook & Twitter feeds or you've managed to block me until now. Well done on both counts. If you don't want to read about running, please look away now. I'll probably be blogging about something you might find interesting in a couple of years. I'm thinking 'tweed' but there's still time to decide on that.

I didn't want to be a runner. In fact, I took pride in telling my parents (Christmas 2012) that I'd never run because it was just so boring. This was despite the fact that my wife ran regularly and I would turn up at parkrun and clap. In a moment of weakness, perhaps because I'd offered to drive her to run at King's Lynn at 9am on New Year's Day 2013, I decided I'd give it a go. I didn't really enjoy it but there was free fruit and the parkrun people seemed quite nice. I tried again the following week back in Cambridge and got a bit quicker. There was cake at the end. I like cake. Now I'm a member of a running club with two half marathons and plenty of shorter races under my belt. I own more running shoes than I do normal shoes. Lycra now takes up approximately 40% of my wardrobe & chest of drawers. So definitely a convert.

I decided that it might be a good idea to run a marathon. It's such an iconic distance. My wife is running Brighton in April, and I thought it might be good to coincide our training plans. Plus it means I get to use skills from my job for a training plan - i.e. cobbling together a spreadsheet with lots of pastel colours that sort of represents what I want it to show.

So why am I sitting here tapping away on the laptop instead of running? Well soon after signing up for a marathon, I discovered a bit of an injury. After a Thursday night tempo session, I discovered that walking down stairs was practically impossible and killed my right knee. At the time I felt like a fair price to pay as the run had felt good.

I have 'weak hips'. Now as an accountant, I've never needed to consider whether my hips were strong or not. I'm unlikely to get the call up to Strictly Come Dancing and unless technology gets so clever that I can formulate a spreadsheet using some wiggling and gyrating of my waist, it was never really going to be a problem for me. Instead my new life means that I have a piece of green elastic band following me around the house as I attempt to buff up my hips. It's fairly tedious but I can now stand on one leg for more than three seconds without face planting. I'm on four.

Apparently though you are supposed to Listen To Your Body. Well my brain was telling me that I still wanted to run, so I've been keeping up the mileage over Christmas and set a 10k PB in a gale. So I listened to my brain - who wouldn't - as it's served me pretty well so far in life. All going well.

I've structured a nice 3:30 training plan from Runner's World, adding in an additional week in case I got injured, which started on Monday 6th January. So full steam ahead - tally ho!

Obviously I haven't recovered. Despite having a heavy cold for a week, little sleep and being away in Barcelona with work, I banged out a five mile run on Thursday morning with my knee already slightly painful on the day before and regretted it immediately. Possibly not immediately, but when I was limping through Gatwick trying to make the earliest train home, I cursed myself. I may have also cursed people around me because I couldn't really hear properly from the cold. Sorry about that.

Well that and a stonking cold have knocked me sideways this week, leaving me down on mileage by 14 miles. So here I am on a Sunday morning. Week 1 of a 17 week plan drinking a cup of tea and trying to work out if I can justify some more Soreen Fruit Loaf in my life. So this is my back-up 'illness' week, before I've even properly started.

This time I'm going to LTMB. I'm going to sit, and do nothing until at least tomorrow when all the world's problems will have been righted and 6 miles at 8:50 pace will be perfectly appropriate. Plus my man flu cold will have disappeared. I might also have become a better husband, become respected for my revolutionary accounting opinions and also developed a cure for the common cold. Here's hoping.

I'm going to call this the logic of the runner.

PS - I'm going to leave this with a picture of Richard Lyle, the merry leader of Wimpole parkrun, author of a blog too and destroyed of running dreams on Tuesday evenings.

Edit: I also look silly in a hat, so I'm putting me in too.