Blue Runnings

Definitely not feeling it this weekend. My intention this Thursday was to have Friday off (check), run the parkrun at Blackhill on Saturday (nope), and then do a longer run on Sunday (just about). I missed the parkrun on Saturday by getting distracted by completely purging my wardrobe (seriously, about 70% of my clothes are in a big black bag right now) and was just generally unmotivated to get changed and get my butt out the door. So my aim to attend every parkrun in April, knowing I didn’t have any conflicting events has been a flop at the final hurdle. Ho-hum – pick up and try again!

I woke up this morning to the alarm call of a sparrow and a morning visit from the pusskins, looked out the window to a beautiful sunny morning, went to fill up my bird feeders (not that I’ve seen many birds lately, a pair of sparrowhawks have moved into the area and all my little garden birds have just gone to ground 😦 ), grabbed some breakfast and then realised it was 06:30. Seize the day and all that right?! P is night shift tonight, so I pottered around in the morning sunshine, kicked him out of bed at nine so he’d be able to go back to sleep this afternoon and I’d go for my run then so my bimbling about wouldn’t keep him up. We were intending to take advantage of the bright morning and go for a walk round the bottom of the Derwent Reservoir, across the dam to the visitor centre – we’ve been down to the dam before but never quite made it further. Unfortunately by the time we got there around 10am, I was for some reason feeling incredibly tired, and with the wind picking up and the roar of several dirtbikes echoing across from the other side of the lake I was really not feeling up to it today, so we wimped out and turned back in relatively short order.

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Another trip down the river after work – I met J down by the river for a jaunt around the lime heaps before I picked P up from work. We did a total of 4km, but had to do a couple of loops around the car park to get the last 0.5km! We did the same loop around the Spetchells we did the other day – heading round the back and then when we came back around to the river side we headed up the side and over the top. The hill up the side of the hill is deceptive – it starts shallow-ish, then has quite a steep bit, but what you can’t see from the bottom is that from the top of the steep bit is another long stretch which is about in the middle of the other two stages in pitch…

J, feeling really ambitious at the bottom, decided that we’d try and run up it and see how far we could get – we walked this stretch last time and carried on our jog at the top. I’d headed up first, and made it all the way to the top – but only because the point when I wanted to give up and walk again, I was within about 20 metres of the top and there was no way I was baling out that close! I also sneakily knew I’d probably be able to gasp a breather at the top if J was moving slower than I was up the hill. J made it up about 2/3’s of the way – and this is a biiiiiig hill so that’s a great achievement! She’s been enjoying the odd hill training session but I haven’t got her persuaded to do the Blackhill ParkRun yet…who needs hill training sessions in Consett?! It’s difficult to get a training session in that doesn’t involve at least one somewhere!!!

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I took this session really really slow – so slow in fact that I set up the blog page between sets… I did my first attempt at the walk-the-plank chin-ups on Saturday, and really knew about it by the time Monday and Tuesday had swung round! Not my because of my shoulders or arms – my abs were killing me! If I keep this up I’ll just need to do some oblique sit-ups to work on the side and lower abs, the chin-ups are taking care of the top and central muscles! They really made their presence known every time I laughed or coughed. I’ve read on weight-lifting sites and in books that if you’re shifting heavy weights (and I guess shifting me counts as that!), then the muscle build and metabolism gain last about 48 hours – so you’re best to do a work-out every other day to have sufficient recovery and growth time, so ideally I should have been hanging off my bar on Monday or Tuesday, but my abs just couldn’t face it on Monday, and I opted for going out with Run England on Tuesday instead as I haven’t been out with them for ages.

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I was really pleased with my mega-long run on Sunday, so when Monday rocked around I was really worried to find that the longer P & I bimbled about the Metrocentre, the more my left foot hurt – the outer side was getting worse and worse the longer I walked until when we went back to the car I was almost at a snail’s pace and didn’t really want to put much weight on it. If you look up ‘pain on outer edge of foot’, the search results are pretty unanimous – you’ve either got a stress fracture in the metatarsels or something really obscure. Symptoms of a stress fracture? Doesn’t hurt when resting (check), and gets noticeably worse the longer you put weight on it (check). Symptoms may not appear when the injury first happens but build over the next few days and weeks – foot swelling, increase in amount of pain when walking, etc. etc. Just what one needs when one’s calendar is full of race events and there’s just over 4 weeks to an assault run and just over 8 weeks to a half marathon. Expected recovery time if minor? 6 weeks. No, thank you.

I rested Monday evening and the pain subsided, I woke up Tuesday morning feeling fine, and decided that if it was broken, I would probably know by lunchtime as the pain was likely to build again, or at least so the internet (that most credible source of information) led me to believe. At least in this case, typing my symptoms in didn’t lead to it telling me I died last Thursday. If it did arise, I would go to the walk-in centre after work and see what advice, if any other than ‘rest it’, they could give me. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday all passed with very on-feet days at work, in my heavy steel-toed work boots, and my foot problems didn’t arise again. Monday was looking like a strong possibility in terms of symptoms; Tues, Weds and Thurs definitely not. So, tonight I decided to try a short jog around the Spetchells with J to see how I was holding up, in my shiny new sun visor as it was such a nice bright evening. We went round and up and down and over in a way that typically does not show on the elevation graph – so I get no credit for running up the steps! I got all the way round the 3km very comfortably with no hold ups until we were on the path heading back to the carpark when it spiked me with a ‘Hello! Not forgotten me had you?!’. Bleurgh.

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I knew I wanted to do a long run at some point this weekend, and decided for some reason last night to check the weather forecast, which I don’t usually bother to do as it is what it is. Unfortunately the forecast was for light rain by 11am, heavy rain from 12 until 2pm, then light showers all afternoon until 6pm – so if I wanted my run to have a chance of being dry, it would have to be an early one, and I was still pottering about the internet at 11pm last night. J was looking to do a run this morning, but didn’t want to do the 10 miles-ish I was aiming for, so I suggested that I would leave from Prudhoe, cover the stretch to Wylam road bridge I had done earlier in the week, and then carry on from Wylam down to Newburn on our usual 10k route – J could start from Wylam, and I’d see if I could catch her up.

J met me at Prudhoe to try on my new pink monstrosities and see if she wanted to get a pair for the No Ego challenge next week – we’re going to be trainer buddies for that one! She then popped home to sort some bits out, and then headed down to Wylam – about a 10 minute drive away. I felt much better than I had last time I did the Prudhoe-Wylam leg, when my heart really wasn’t in it, I can’t say I was bubbling with enthusiasm, and the weather didn’t really help – it was very dingy and grey with the promised rain to come, but I felt much lighter and steadier in gait than I had last time and quietly determined to pootle my way around my intended course.

J had kindly parked her car in a very conspicuous place in Wylam carpark so I knew she’d left on her merry way when I reached there, about 25 mins after leaving Prudhoe. The route along to Newburn has some very long straight sections, and I knew from our interval session last time that seeing her in the distance would still take me a while to catch up when I was relying purely on my trot-along pace being about 30 seconds/km quicker than hers – I’d eat the distance up but it wouldn’t be an exciting movie-style fast-paced car chase. Somewhat depressingly, along the first few long straights there was no sign of her – which meant I wasn’t even slowly closing a visible distance! And when she did finally come into sight, there were about 3 different groups of cyclists heading towards me also in neon green or yellow waterproof tops so I couldn’t even be 100% sure that it was J I’d seen – it was, but she was the far distant one and soon after disappeared again around a corner. This was about the time the rain started – fortunately only a minor drizzle, but it didn’t let up for the rest of the run and turned into heavy rain just after I’d gotten back into the car at the end!

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When we first converted the spare room into a gym, I decided I would only buy things as and when I determined that I needed them, rather than trying to fit every exercise accessory under the sun in there and then having them accumulate into a heap and never see the light of day. Recently, I decided that I needed more stuff. Ok, I totally didn’t need it, but more things occurred anyway! The motivators for my shopping spree? Several upcoming things – firstly SUMMER! Followed closely and in some ways superceded by the Gelt Gladiator assault course, and assisted by a side helping of No Ego Trail Challenge. It’s looking very much like the Run England session last week was winter’s last punch – the evenings and nights are still chilly, but the days are looking decidedly bright and warm at the moment – sometimes even consecutively!

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