Now Look What You’ve Done!

I should not have listened to you. All that talk about flowers and chocolate, I should have ignored it and moved on. Instead I traipsed to the shop. The florist was closed, but I got a box of very nice Swiss chocolate. And what was the result? Niamh didn’t believe that I would buy expensive chocolate just to apologise for that little row in the car on Tuesday night. As much as I insisted that I hadn’t committed any other offences, she remained suspicious. Sigh. I blame you lot. Yes, you. (Just in case that kind of humour doesn’t translate over the Atlantic, yes, I am kidding. [Niamh’s still suspicious though].)

**********

I don’t know how it could happen so fast. I was only off the road for 4 days, but I’ve gained nearly 5 pounds in the meantime. If I ever give up running, I’ll turn into a walrus within half a year!

So, after four days off, I’ve started running again. The head wasn’t entirely healed, but I felt 98% recovered, the headache was gone, there was just a little bit of “something” at the back of my head, and I wanted to test the waters. Any sign of trouble and I would have returned immediately. As it was, I was fine. The doctor had insisted I wouldn’t run as far as 10k, so I figured 5 miles would be perfectly acceptable. I tried to run in a measured way, but after gathering dust for 4 days the legs refused to be reined in, as I knew they would. They say you don’t lose any fitness over 4 days. Well, let them say that, but I definitely started to breathe hard after 3 miles, and was quite happy to be home again after less than 40 minutes. It was enough to blow away the cobwebs.

Saturday turned out to be a really nice and warm day (spring in February???), and I spent several hours working in the garden. After that my lower back really hurt, and to top it all off, I was totally exhausted in the evening and fell asleep at 10 pm. I slept for nearly 11 hours.

I want to jump straight back into my normal training week, and Sunday is the day of my fast run, so once I managed to peel myself out of bed it was time to put on the fast shoes and start working hard. The legs didn’t feel very responsive though. I don’t know if it was the enforced pause, yesterday’s too-fast run, the hours in the garden or all of those things together, but I didn’t feel too good initially. But when I passed the first mile in about 7:11, I thought I might have a good workout after all. Initially I struggled to get the heart rate high enough into the tempo run zone, it continued to hover around the 162 mark. I tried pushing the effort on a few occasions, but fell back into the slower pace each time. Apart from one hill, the road is reasonably flat until about 3.75 miles, then there’s a climb until the 4.5 mile point, where I would turn around. I pushed it a bit too hard up that incline, the heart rate shot up all the way to 180 and my breathing had long gone haywire, but I recovered on the way down again, and after that it seemed to go better. I was quite pleased with the second part of the run. The first leg had taken me 30:27, the return was a little bit faster at 30:10, which gave me a total of 1:00:37. I’d have taken that before the workout started.

Nana and Gaga are here for a short visit from Dublin, and I used the trip to Killarney to collect them to go into the Nike shop to get a new pair of runners. I know Mike didn’t approve when I bought my previous pair of Nike 360s a few months ago, but I was really happy with them and resolved to buy a new pair to replace them. My preferred shoes are Asics Nimbus, but I like alternating shoes for each run, and my legs seem to respond best to alternating two different kinds of shoes. Wearing Nike one day and Asics the next seems to work perfectly well. As it turns out, they had a special offer, if you buy two (already heavily reduced) pairs you get the second one at half price, and I couldn’t resist. Even Niamh grudgingly admitted that it made sense, though she despairs at the fact that I've now got 6 pairs of runners again (2 for training, 1 for racing and tempo runs, 1 for football and now 2 new ones), only weeks after chucking out a whole lot of them. But hey, 140 Euros for 2 new pairs, that’s less than the rrp for one pair of 360s alone.

I’m playing with the idea of putting my present pair of Nimbus at the back of the cupboard and saving them for the ultra in April. They’ve got 160 miles on them and feel just about perfect now. If I preserve them for a few weeks and then use them for 2 or 3 long runs before the race, I should have the perfect pair of shoes for the race. Hmm, I might do just that.

3 Feb: 5 miles, 37:32, 7:30 pace, avg. HR 156
4 Feb: 9 miles, 1:00:37, 6:44 pace, avg. HR 165

Weekly mileage: 25 (ah well)