15 miles

[Charliecat5]

Three weeks since Almeria.  Four weeks since I’ve run in my beloved hills.   With the family away it was the perfect weekend to give myself a good old adrenalin hit and strap on the trail shoes.   An old school text conversation earlier in the week and a plan was hatched.  BGG, OATR and I would run the second half of the Moyleman to check the state of the route.  You can read an excellent account of this here.

The run itself was great… good company… lovely views and Downland tracks flowing like velvet.  I was packed full of energy – fuelled by 7 o’clock porridge and Naomi’s Fat Balls; but for the first time in my running experience… all four wheels fell off... I mean really fell off... sheared away from the axles and left on the verge. It was weird… it was confusing… I didn’t like it.   I run at the front of this particular herd… I don’t struggle at the back.  Yet here I was… struggling.  Well and truly at the back. 

It all started at Bo-Peep – although it probably started before – for some reason I developed a blister on the underside of my right foot, dead centre of the arch.  Now I know I hadn’t worn my trail shoes for four weeks and I had skied like a loon last week strapped into ski boots, but really nothing had changed – same shoes, same socks, same trails.  But a blister appeared.  And the problem with blisters is that you can’t run them out.  It was either a long cold walk home, or I had to run it in.  The trouble was that we were still a couple of miles from the half way point.  

I tentatively mentioned my grief to my running mates (alright, I moaned constantly for the best part of 40 minutes.  I eventually stopped moaning when it really, really began to hurt).

The blister led to a change in gait and cadence – I slowed down.  Both of these events conspired to trigger a rebellion of the legs like I have never experienced.   By the time I reached the bottom of Caburn, my IT Bands were screaming (they have never, ever done that before); my calves were popping like magic candy, and my quads almost jumped out to find their own, and flatter, way home. 

For the first time in my running career I found myself walking up Caburn.  This simply doesn’t happen in my world.  

The boys kindly waited for me at the golf course and I managed to hunker down and run Chapel Hill and the last foray up the high street alongside them.  But I’m a broken man.

Still, next week we’re going to run the first half of the Moyleman.  I might wear my other runners.