My calendar is looking sadly more devoid of stars than February. I’ve been averaging three workouts in one form or another a week, compared to the four to five a week I was doing last month, which doesn’t sound too bad – but it means month to date, I’m three short. This does not however mean I have been inactive! Work has been INSANELY busy the last few weeks – which means a lot of clambering around things, pulling heavy things about, and lots and lots of stairs and ladders. You will not however find ‘working on a broken papermachine’ on any workout list anywhere!
I had a plan after Sunday’s run – I would go out with group 2 at the Run England session on Tuesday, do a run by the river with J on Thurs, another run with J on Saturday, and then the No Ego Trail Challenge on Sunday – Tuesday came and went, and I wasn’t out of work in time to go, ditto Wednesday when I’d been thinking of trying the hill training session instead of the Run England session, and then Thursday came around…I made it out of work at a reasonable hour (though still late – we’ll keep working on that one) and invaded Chateau J to go for our run.
We made it down to the bridge in one go – 3km at a good pace, took a breather and had a look for a geocache I’d looked for before intending it to be my first run-by cache and been unable to find – I remain unable to find it and this glorious milestone remains unfulfilled for now! J’s found this one before and has confirmed it is not where it was when she got it, so it’s not just my general inability to find random tupperware! (The temptation to put the ‘my’ in italics instead of the ‘just’ and thereby change the whole emphasis of the sentence just to antagonise J was strong here :P) We walked down the trail bit after the bridge back to the main path before setting off running again, and according to our watches were at a slower pace on the way back – though to me at least it felt smoother and like we were trotting along quicker. Apparently not, we were just chattier! We got back to the carpark at 5.6km, so did a loop round to bring us up to the 6km mark to round it off nicely.
On the way back from the bridge to the car, J was fortunate enough to have to listen to my commentary on butt tectonics – I just couldn’t get my pace right for one stretch of road when we started running again. This happens sometimes and I always feel like my whole mid-section is bouncing along. Normally, when taking each pace the body swings along relatively smoothly, but sometimes, and I don’t know what it is, it’s like I get the wrong arm swinging with each leg or something and I feel like my butt in particular is bouncing along at double the pace I am! Nothing better for building ye olde self-confidence like a bottom that jiggles along with a mind of its own! A quick walking skip got it settled back into place again, but I have had several km’s on a race before where it didn’t matter what speed or gait I tried, it didn’t feel right. Maybe one day I shall be an elegant long-legged gazelle of a runner, but for the moment I think I’m going to have to settle for being more of a Takin of Bhutan and plodding along (no, I’d never heard of one either, isn’t the internet wonderful?!).
Anyway…back to the run…
I don’t know what it is with my watch or the mapmyrun software, but for some reason when I upload it, the pace and times don’t seem to match what I’m looking at while running, guess my pace varies more than I thought to give me such skewed averages – but I swear I didn’t see anything above 07:44min/km on the way back, and nearer 07:30min/km on the way there. We did each leg in one go without a walking break except at the bridge – which was a first for this route when we’ve run it together! Next time, the WHOLE THING! Mwahahahaha
Saturday is looking promising – hopefully we’ve had enough work disasters that I can at least have the weekend off, so we’ll be off for a dawn run – 10km at Wylam. It’s written down on the interwebs now so I have to go! Tomorrow I may even try a gym workout :O It’s been a while since I did one of those too…my triceps have had enough of a holiday!
Blue Runnings 
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