The Shipping News
The first week of May has passed more than adequately with three good runs in the bag. The first one I have already written about, albeit in rather (ahem) emotive terms. This was followed two days later with a rather good, gentle hill climb. 15.5km were covered, with an ascent of 463 metres (a little over 1,500 feet). Although a modest incline, all such climbs of course become difficult after a few kilometres, but I dealt with this quite comfortably, and with nearly 30 kilometres and 800 metres of ascent in the running log from just the first two runs of May, all was looking good. The long, slow, weekend run sat there in the diary, ready to be knocked off, and I gave it barely a thought in the two days leading up to it.
So, then. On to that barely-considered long, slow run today. As has been the norm of late, I awoke to the prospect of this outing without any form of dread at all. I had, as has been noted already, prepared well with two brilliant mid-week efforts. However, the eagerness with which I had looked forward to the long run on other weekends had for some reason vanished, and I was left with an empty, vacant kind of ambivalence. Physically, I felt sure that it presented no great difficulty, but mentally I just wasn't quite there. Neither 'gung' nor 'ho' immediately leapt to mind when trying to describe my attitude, and it is true that I took my time preparing. Rather than immediately leaping into the running kit I chose instead a leisurely half hour out in the morning sun with a mug of tea, mulling over my next Scrabble move in the game I'm playing online with my cousin Sue, who resides somewhere in Shropshire.
Tea and Scrabble dealt with however, it was time to bite the bullet and simply get on with it. And, bullet bitten, on with it I did get. The problem with this run was not the physical input required, after all, over each of the last ten weeks I've averaged 52km, which includes a very high percentage of hill climbs and tempo runs. That I was fit enough to undertake a gentle long run of 25 or so kilometres I had no doubt, but as has been promulgated in these pages several times before, the mental aspect of this game is extremely important, and in that regard I was about as prepared for this run as Pyongyang is for the dawn of democracy.
In short, I struggled. The truth is that it was just plain boring, and I really didn't want to be there. But it is just two weeks now to race day, and this was my last chance to slot in another long run before the big event, so I wasn't about to throw in the towel. I played a lot of mind games to stay focussed on the task at hand, and at times I became a little desperate. It's true that I did wonder briefly and attempted to calculate how much Riga black balsam it would take to deliver me a merciful death, but in truth these thoughts were only fleeting and of course, a great exaggeration of my anguish. Still, you get my point, I'm sure: it was a cheerless, soulless run, like the gloomy Newfoundland winters from that Annie Proux novel, full of wind and snow and general hardship. But it is interesting to see just how difficult running becomes when the brain isn't in tune with the task at hand, or the task at foot, as the case may be.
Speaking of feet, I have an injury to report! First though I'll spare you an agonising wait and tell you that I did of course, go on to complete my run, logging a tidy 25.5km, my tenth run of more than 20km this year already, and sixteenth run of greater than 15km. For me, that is unheard of, and I'm very well pleased, I can certainly assure you, especially given it is only the first week of May.
But the injury is the interesting bit. I've been losing a toenail on my left foot in recent weeks; at first it just went black, but then started to come away from the flesh. Then it settled down, but now has gone a bit yucky again. However, it doesn't hurt (much), and actually, this isn't the injury I refer to, seeing how toenail loss is a pretty normal part of distance running. Rather, when I removed my shoes and socks and gave the old black and loosened toenail the once over, I noticed with just a little alarm a large lump about the size of a marble on the top of my right foot. This was surprising, because it didn't hurt at all and its presence was a total surprise, but it looked red and angry and a little too large for my liking. However, a brief referral to Dr Google showed it to probably be nothing more than a common tendon irritation caused by tight shoes, or, more likely in this case, tight lacing. It was true that the lump was right at the point where the shoe lace was tightest, and has sometimes caused some minor irritation before. I therefore changed the lacing on my day shoes to remove pressure from that spot, and now, a few hours later the swelling and redness have reduced considerably. That I mention it at all is only to indicate how surprisingly injury-free I have been despite a major increase in running for me this year. Already I've racked up 725 kilometres for 2017, and every single one of the niggling aches and pains that I had at the start of this campaign have vanished. Pains in my knees and toes and that slightly worrying deep-seated ache in my left hip have all but gone, leaving me even more certain that the 'use it, or lose it' mantra applies ever more strongly as I get ever older.
It especially cheers me to think back 13 or so years ago to the time my GP told me my left knee would almost certainly need 'replacing' within a few years, such was its deteriorated condition at the time. More recently, toward the end of 2015, which was my worst year of running since I took up the sport, I had such severe arthritic stabbing pains in the toes of both feet that at times I felt almost crippled by them, and which motivated me to get moving again. In the following year with a careful but significant increase in running, the pains subsided, and right now it's as if I never had any pain there at all.
I'm pretty sure too, that my weight reduction through all this running also helps in reducing the impact and strain on joints and ligaments. I'm at my lowest weight ever as an adult, having run off 10 kilograms over the last six months. I wasn't exactly obese to begin with, so this is a considerable amount for me, but I'm feeling the benefits, even if Mrs MLCMM says I've lost too much and that my clothes are 'hanging off me'. But I'm happy to trade style for fitness any day, and in any case I can always buy new, smaller clothes, of course.
So, without wishing to jinx myself, I have to say that the new, smaller, fitter me is running well and looking forward to continued good health ahead. I'm still not running as fast as I used to, but I'm definitely stronger and healthier, and that, of course, is the important thing.
May as well go for broke.
