Well not really. I spotted a bloke photographing a teddy bear in a wood. Didn’t stop to talk to him, just ran faster!
This weekend I’ve done a couple of long-ish runs and a short-ish one that totals 46.7k They were mostly off road with others. Saturday’s was a little slower than Sunday’s, with Sunday’s being quite warm in places, especially when I was running with the wind.
Highlight of the week was a 2,000m swim in 32:40 – but I was drafting so it doesn’t really count!
Last Sunday I got a train to Mortimer and then ran home along the footpaths. It took just over three hours, and there was some walking. Mostly because some of the footpaths along a 3k stretch were in an appalling condition. To be honest though, there were a few other bits of walking too. I am not as fit as I want to be.
The best bit though was I was out running. And it rained. Very hard. So hard it made my face hurt. The squall lasted about five minutes and then it eased off. I liked those five minutes. A lot.
Mortimer – 17 July
In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.
I find this so true at the moment. Randomly surfing the internet for hours at a time in the evenings with no real purpose.
For a long while I have had a goal. Do IM Lanzarote again. But it quickly began to grate on me and became an annoyance, a chore, rather than fun. The first time I aimed for Lanzarote it was fun. A goal. A challenge. So I want something like that again. But what.
I’ve thought about a lot of things: A long swim, a long run, another ironman, some other endurance event. But none of them appeals for long.
I want a dream. I want something to aspire me, to get me out of bed in the morning, to give me a passion, a vibrancy… I have a will to do something extra-ordinary that will challenge me more than I can imagine. But everything I look at just seems grey and ordinary. Occasionally I will see a sparkle (a 14k swim, a 50 mile run or whatever) but the clouds go across and the ordinariness returns.
I’ve been pottering a long but not really doing much, apart from eating.
It’s Saturday so the taxi service starts early with a trip to the ice rink. Then its back home and take the dog for a long walk. Within 5 minutes of coming home, it’s off to the ice rink again. First thing in the morning it is very cold there. But they open up a cafe at 8-ish and so it is warmer for the rest of the morning.
Exercise-wise, nothing much has happened. I’ve been riding to work a bit (70k) but no proper training. Swimming has been pretty poor too. I think I have been stalling with it because of the horrible hay-fever symptoms that I get for the rest of the day. The nose clips have helped a bit but keep coming off. Or at least they did until I found a new pair that work really well. I am going to try to buy another pair so I have a spare and also try to find a way of attaching them to my goggles (a royal mail elastic band) so that I don’t lose them in the lake.
The re-engineered running hasn’t gone well though. I started off running once or twice a day until I got food poisoning. After that I went for a forty minute run with a few others and the shoes dug into my heals resulting in a cut/blister. By that I mean it is a kind of cut into the skin with a blister either side of that that then seemed to combine. Sore! This meant I did less running. I then wore some minimal sandals on a six hour shopping/walking trip to Cardiff. The blisters I got on my toes meant that I walked wrongly on my heels and this meant that I got a sore right heel. Running then made it worse.
So, I have partially un-re-engineered my run. Body posture is still there. I run like that quite easily now, only sometimes catching myself reverting back. The flat foot landing is something that is harder. It seems to work quite easily with my left foot but my right foot doesn’t like it as much – perhaps because of the sore heel. So, I have decided to concentrate on making my heels land, but only after the ball of the foot has touched. Before, my heels didn’t touch. The other change that will happen is to make sure that I don’t land on the outside of my feet. That will take a bit more concentration if I allow a bit more of a forefoot landing.