Stars Shining Bright Above You

I was still on a high on Monday night after Sunday’s success (that’s the part about my run, not the one about Cian), but when the alarm went off Tuesday morning I was a bit apprehensive about yet another tempo run. I knew that it was a bit silly; I shouldn’t feel under pressure to repeat great workouts again and again. In fact, racing myself to run ever faster times from tempo run to tempo run would be a one-way ticket to injury and breakdown.

But as soon as I was out on the road I knew immediately that I couldn’t even try and repeat Sunday’s workout. It takes more than two days for my legs to recover from that kind of run, and I felt sluggish and found it difficult to get the legs moving at any semblance of speed. I did as best as I could, and for once I really can’t blame the weather. It was a cloudless night with very little wind and a spectacular starry sky, at least for the first half of the run, until dawn broke. On the downside it was a lot colder than on previous days (I guess somewhere around –1C/30F) and I wasn’t entirely prepared for that. I did wear gloves, but very thin ones, and my fingers got very cold and stiff. Anyway, when I got closer to the usual turnaround point I noticed that despite not feeling up to it I was still moving faster than usual, and I added some extra distance before turning back. I just about managed negative splits on the way back (despite the cold starting to bite), and hit an average pace of 7:00. The heart rate was very low for a tempo effort, but it still felt like hard work, honestly. To feel slightly sluggish and still be able run the second fastest tempo run ever will do me.

Amongst the two least favourite things to happen the night before a run are feeling some pain in your legs, and not being able to sleep until about 1 am, and I managed to experience both last night. To top it all off, the next storm front is supposed to hit tomorrow, but we got a good taste of it today. When I got ready for today’s run I couldn’t help but listen to the wind and rain outside. While I didn’t contemplate going back to bed, I did question my own sanity, and not for the first time either. But as it turns out I was actually quite lucky; I left at about 5:50am when it was still raining, but that stopped about 5 minutes later. Then the stars came out in force again, and I even saw two shooting stars over the next 2 hours. The wind kept blowing with quite some force though, and the next big dark cloud got closer and closer as I was on my home stretch. It started raining heavily with about 1 minute left, but that didn’t bother me, for once I had managed almost perfect timing.

The achilles has started hurting again, and today I definitely felt it for most of the run. If it gets any worse I’ll have to cut back for a bit, but for the time being I’m still hopeful of being able to train through it. It’s not really painful (yet), just bothersome. I’ve started doing some exercises that have helped in the past. I wish I had the discipline to keep doing those when I’m not hurting; it might have prevented the present problems entirely.

Cian had his first accident-free day yesterday. Hurray. Sadly he didn’t manage to repeat that feat today.

16 Jan: 8.5 miles, 59:30, 7:00 pace, avg. HR 154
17 Jan: 14.5 miles, 2:01, 8:20 pace, avg. HR 146