Blue Runnings

Some people like to exercise first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, some like to leave it an hour or two after a meal, tonight I ran on pizza tummy. P is working nightshift tonight and didn’t sleep too well today – so motivation to clean the kitchen and think about dinner before I got home from work was at a low ebb, and wanting something quick and easy, he ordered pizza for dinner. Dominos doesn’t sit with me at the best of times – high dairy foods never do, and it’s one of those foods like chinese that I occasionally get a hankering for until it actually turns up, and then my appetite for it is sated very very quickly. It’s basically ‘what can I have for dinner which requires the absolute minimum amount of effort from me?’. Normally, post pizza me is not much good for anything for the rest of the evening except groaning and holding my tummy, but today I had told myself I was going out, and going out I was!

I mentioned yesterday I’ve had a craving for new routes and just something a bit different to my usual old haunts, and I had a couple in mind for this week which I’ve been thinking of doing for a while. Normally, if I’m doing a stretch of the Derwent Walk, I park up at where Ebchester Station used to be, and run downhill (I use this term loosely – it’s a very very very shallow gradient) towards Rowland’s Gill and then back again. I’d passed signs for the old Shotley Bridge Station on my way back from purchasing a print from this lovely lady a few weeks ago and knew it was on the Derwent Walk further up from Ebchester, so decided today to head that way and see how far – knowing reassuringly it wasn’t a huge distance further up.

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I went out for a run on Saturday morning, and going out tonight wasn’t any easier. I’m hoping that if I go out a couple of times this week I’ll get some stamina back again and maybe even get further than 5k without feeling like death! It really does feel like I’ve had the clock turned back 6 months or something – I can do the distance without a walking break, but I don’t find it easy and I’m not enjoying it as much – it’s just determination to get past it that’s pushing me to go out.

I’ve also got a real craving for new routes and different places rather than the same old well-trodden paths. I was picking P up from work at 7pm today, so did go to an old haunt down by the river, but rather than aiming for a certain point to turn around at, I thought I’d do it by time rather than distance and see how far I got – I had about 35 mins to go out in including stretch off and pile back into the car time, so I jogged along for 12 mins figuring that the way back would take me slightly longer, and turned around then instead of going for a physical marker. I was actually only about 45 seconds longer on the way back than the way there, and I knew I’d had a burst of unsustainably too fast at the start. Once I’d got this puffed out the way my pace turns out to have been pretty much flat as a pancake which is good – it didn’t feel like it, I wasn’t quite at foot-dragging stage but as with Saturday, it would have required more mental stamina than I had to turn around and do it again!

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Well, hello there trainers, it’s been a while! Three weeks to be precise, and damn do I know it! For an assortment of excuses including the weather, travel, hiking, work and general laziness, I haven’t been out in a while! 🙂 This morning I finally found a degree of motivation and thought I’d head over to the Derwent Reservoir and go out over the dam – P and I have walked along to the near end of the dam before, but not along it.

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It’s been a fortnight since my last ‘exercise session’ – excluding Ireland. Last week, between packing for Dublin, ridiculous heat, and a lot of travelling, I got nothing in after my cycle session with the guys on the Monday. Ireland definitely counts as exertion! We walked many miles with heavy bags on in a heatwave. I only had my watch tracking on the actual trail legs – S’s phone tracker included all the faffing about Dublin and general area exploring, and if I remember correctly had us capped at about 50 miles in three days which is most respectable. I got back on the Monday night after a relatively low exertion day around Dublin – we stayed in the hotel as late as possible and then hopped onto a tour bus for two hours before heading to the airport for my flight. I was wrecked when I got back – straight to bed when I got home, and not a huge amount better for work on Tuesday – I was completely useless, couldn’t tell my ass from my elbow! Fortunately it was a quiet day, I slept like a log that night and have been vaguely functional but still feeling too tired to push myself to do much for the whole of last week.

Now however, the weekend has been – P has been working day shifts and I deliberately had him take the car yesterday, for one thing it meant I didn’t have to get up at 6am to drop him off when I desperately wanted to have something vaguely resembling a lie-in (that’s 08:30 for me!) and it also meant I was housebound or confined to the locality within walking distance so couldn’t feel pressured into flinging around doing the shopping or spending the few pennies I have left after Ireland on more frivolous things. I’ve read 2 books and pootled about the house doing the minimum housework to keep things chugging over and I feel so much better for it.

I still haven’t done a run, I’m saving that for tomorrow – this morning was a 04:30 wake-up with P, who had woken up ridiculously early and got straight into the shower so I thought it was time to go and dashed about as I needed the car today (no food in the house!) before realising what a ridiculous time it was. I did however, do a work-out for the first time in 2 months. Putting my trainers on after so long felt like coming back to old friends, so while tired I don’t feel like I’m in the rut I was about 2 months ago. I went back to my old faithful strength conditioning circuit in Women’s Running from November or something and worked through it three times with the 2kg weights. I’ve definitely lost something, the tricep curls and leg-dip things were harder than I remember, but I managed the full reps on all three circuits without having to drop the weight down. If I can keep doing it at least once a week I’ll be back on the 2.5kg and eyeing up the 3kg weights in no time 🙂

P’s on night shift Monday and Tuesday night, so my intention is to go and do a pootle by the river after dropping him off, but I’m waiting until tomorrow to see how far and how fast I feel like going 🙂 Time to get back into this 🙂

I say it every month, but the year is rapidly eluding me – half gone already! If this is how fast a year goes at 26, I’m dreading turning 30 let alone older! I’ll never keep track of things! It’s getting into summer proper now and I must confess the latter end of June I have found it a struggle to get out sometimes with the humidity. I missed the Run England session last week as I was prepping for Dublin, but it was so humid it sounds like most of the guys headed home after half their routes and just walked back struggling with getting their breathing and generally being too hot so it doesn’t sound like I missed a tremendous barrel of laughs!

It has been something of a milestone month for me, I’ve been to one of my ‘bucket list’ Northern races in the Blaydon Race (the other on the list being the Great North Run in September – watch this space, it will be here in no time!), and surviving my first ever half marathon – the Rock ‘n’ Roll Half at Liverpool! I’ve been taking something of a break from events since Liverpool, I did the Newburn River Race with J a few days after, and have been and am event free until the Colour Obstacle Rush with J and my sister on the 17th of July, which I might remember I’m doing a few days before hand when my sister appears on the doorstep!

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The Wicklow Way lodge was amazing – I wanted to steal the sheets, they were so soft and we both slept really well. Breakfast was yummy and they made us a packed lunch too 🙂

After yesterday’s hike being rather tougher than expected, and today’s and Sunday’s looking to be twice as long and twice as high, we opted for showing our flexibility rather than ruining our holiday breaking ourselves and opted for getting two buses to Enniskerry and exploring the waterfall there before trekking the 4km from there to the hostel. That was the plan anyway.

The waterfall is at the back of the Powerscourt estate, which is just outside Enniskerry and both house/gardens and waterfall are signposted from the town, but with no distances. First leg was straight up a hill – not what we were looking for. Carry on following the signs for the waterfall…lots of downhill (dreading the prospect of getting back up to Enniskerry and onwards) and we hit a junction with a distance sign…another 4km to go and starting uphill again. We tried calling a taxi company, but as we weren’t at a landmark or address they couldn’t come out until we hit one, so we started heading for the b&b in the same direction but 2km away. We ended up hitching a lift with a lovely young couple who dropped us off at the entrance to the waterfall park. Having passed the hill to the b&b we would have died making it there with our bags!

It was about 10 mins to the waterfall proper where we stopped to shove our packed lunches in our faces and have a well-deserved rest!

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After much bimbling round Dublin looking for some sort of supermarket to get food from for our trip – food on route dubious for legs 2&3 – we found a Dunnes and stocked up on tuna sachets, wraps and pasta mug shots. We also managed to find mugs and plastic cutlery so all final missing odds were accounted for! With my fleece in the plastics on the front of my bag and the waterproof cover over it rather than taking up a side pocket I was even able to fit these new purchases in! Most impressed with my own packing (read: cramming) success. We got to the bus stop for Glendalough 15 mins before it was due to leave – it was already loading and there were enough people before us that there were only about 7 seats left! We had a pretty uneventful drive of about 1.5 hours to get to the visitor centre at Glendalough.

We didn’t bother going into the visitor centre here as you had to pay and it didn’t look like there was much in there compared with outside, which was free so we went to check out the tower, church and miscellaneous other building in the big graveyard.

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I got to Dublin in one piece, I was sat right by the propeller so my plans to nap on the plane went right out the window – it was too noisy. Rubber band airways, but at least it was a short one, I was getting quite fidgety near the end.

S had booked us in at a hotel near where our bus leaves from this morning, turns out it’s a super fancy Georgian style one. We went hunting for food after check in and with how late my flight was it was midnight by the time we got to bed. Having been up since 04:45 and driven 6 hours that day I was not the best company! Hotel itself is fine but someone was very kindly repeatedly slamming a very heavy door at 6am and the seagulls were screaming so I’m still a bit bleary eyed.

6 mile to do today, with my lovely heavy bag. At least it’s smaller than S’s! It’s going to be a tough weekend on my back as well as my legs, I can tell already!

Hopefully tonight’s more peaceful – we’re in a b&b in the mountains so it should be quiet at least 🙂

Mine’s the dinky bag on the right 😉

Monday again and that means bike day in my office, for the summer at least. Last time I risked a wobble on the bike for 5km and found it plenty hard work even over that distance. This time, with inflated tyres and a helmet that while definitely still not threaded up correctly at least wasn’t going anywhere, and still no gloves as I knew I had a change of clothes in my bag from a run that never materialised last week but didn’t go any further to consider walking and biking might have some slight variations in clothing requirements! At least I’d remembered my trainers this time so wasn’t in steelies!

I met G and C in the carpark, dumped my stuff in G’s car as P had ours from nightshift and was picking me up, and off we went towards the river. I’ve heard C described as slower when G and A go out, but being something of a pootler myself I found it quite a comfortable pace! Pootling along honking my hooter 🙂 everyone should have a bike hooter I have decided, even if it’s not attached to a bike, they are awesome. I have, for the second time unfortunately managed to break mine smooshing it coming to a sudden stop being in completely the wrong gear going up a hill so it’s not working anymore but hopefully A can fix it for me again…  I’m getting there… I did at least make it up the others and didn’t end up coming OFF my bike, so I see that as a win. I’m also figuring out how to change gear without it playing the clicky don’t-know-which-way-to-go song for 5 mins.

I did find doing this distance almost straight off the bat knackering, I’d never have gotten round if I didn’t do my running. Wylam to Newburn and back would have been enough for me! I’ve decided I’m more of a cycle-along-the-Sienne-with-basket-and-baguette sort of cycler than a whizz along at high speed. I’m sure it’s good for something but I still prefer sore feet and knackered knees to butt bruises and vibraty hands! Really feeling the no gloves but I don’t know how much difference they’d have made.

Back to the pavement pounding for now I think!

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