It’s a fishy tail
On Wednesday evening I travelled a little way out of town to meet a client for tea. I ordered fish and chips (I am very partial to fish and chips (some would say obsessed)). It arrived and looked great. There was lots of it, it radiated a lovely smell and it came with homemade mushy peas. Excellent.
But… the fish wasn’t quite as good as it might have been… I ate it as I was with a client and they were paying… but something wasn’t quite right.
On Thursday something was amiss… nothing desperate… no toilet incidents… just a general feeling of not being altogether… well, together. I had already arranged to meet one of our crazy Twitten runners in the evening for a run out to Blackcap, so as there wasn’t really anything wrong with me I decided to go.
We met behind the Prison and set off. Now David, as an aside, is an interesting runner… probably a bit like me I guess. I.e. not very confident in his own running abilities, but seems very at home pounding out the miles over mud and hills.
He set quite a pace up to Blackcap… and when we got to the final assault on the peak itself the game was on. We pushed each other hard up that hill hitting the top at pretty much the same time. Me collapsing on the floor unable to breath, and David bent over double retching. It was a special moment I can tell you. I checked the stats on our return and we did this somewhere between an 8:30 and 9:00 min/mi pace – which for me, on that hill, is bloody fast. Once recovered, we headed back home again. Just short of 6 miles.
However, we need to go back to the fish. Although the ascent of Blackcap was something else, the rest of the run just wasn’t quite there... I wasn’t in the zone. I had to stop a number of times just to have a little breather and overall my pace was off the mark. David was very patient with me.
I have come to realise that it doesn’t take much to knock a run of the edge. In this case a dodgy piece of cod.
