This is how I feel right now – what started as a throat tickle on Sunday has been getting progressively worse, and has today become a full-blown cold; snotty beak, headache, harrumphing elephantine cough and buffalo-esque sneezing (I am LADYLIKE in my malaise!). I’ve had my buff on all day trying to keep my throat warm, and even slept in it last night, and am on the paracetamol and hot squashes in an attempt to get this shifted asap!
This is not proving a good week for running at all. Monday’s run, while faster than previous (hurrah!) was shorter than I was aiming for – and that made it REALLY short, I missed my Run England session for the second week in a row due to massive machine problems at work, and those same machine problems are making it increasingly likely I will miss my 10k run at Bamburgh on Saturday that I’ve been really looking forward to – which will make it the second event I’ve missed this year due to other stuff taking over my diary, and it’s only February. Poopy.
Still, positive is the way forwards! I’m going to continue as though Bamburgh is still happening – you never know, things may either fly with the machine at work and we’ll be starting up Friday night shift, after which I can get a few hours kip and fly up to the coast for my run, or it might be starting later than expected and I can do my run and go in afterwards 🙂 (This totally means I will need to be at work right when I really, really don’t want to be!)
Going for a run with this cold in the cold is out of the question, so I’m working on what I can in the house and at a lower energy intensity than racing the cat up and down the stairs (yes, that is a thing that we do, sometimes she actually lets me win!). For the last week or two, I’ve been experiencing discomfort and slight pain on the inner side of my shin. It doesn’t feel specifically like a torn muscle, and it doesn’t feel like shin splints either. It’s more like how it feels to move when you’ve got a bruise except that there is no bruise and it only hurts when moving, not when poked. It doesn’t actually stop me doing anything, but I’m aware of it and would prefer it got better rather than worse.
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
So! I have been reading up on some different shin stretches, and am going to be doing them morning and evening over the next few days in an attempt to ease this off! I know several general stretches for legs, arms, butt, shoulders, chest, back – the normal sort-of work-out ones, but I’ve never looked at shin specific ones. The website I preferred out of the ones I looked at, in terms of helpful descriptions of stretches in particular is this one on livestrong.com, it’s not a website I’ve used before, and so far I’ve not really had a nosey around to see what I think of the rest of it, but I’ve shamelessly stolen and printed out their shin stretches to go on the wall of my work-out room 🙂
This month’s Women’s Running work-out session has a new warm-up for me to try, but as it looks quite energetic I’m saving it for a running session and sticking with my light weights session as I have been for the last few weeks. In the interest of keeping the old juices flowing and not completely wrecking my energy levels with this cold, I’ve stuck with the 1.5kg hand-weights and just the 2 sets at 10 reps for today. Functional but definitely not feeling at full throttle! Fingers crossed I can shake this for the weekend!
Blue Runnings 
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