Sleepwalking

I know I recently complained about not getting enough sleep. If I had known what was in store, I would have shut up. I guess it’s all down to my whining. Fate has a habit of punishing whiners.

The night from Wednesday to Thursday was bad. I went to bed a bit late (my own fault, of course), but then it really started. At 2 am Shea complained that he didn’t want to sleep in the same room as Cian (after 2 years!). Too tired to argue we let him sleep in our bed. He promptly fell asleep top to toe, and twice viciously kicked me in the face. At 3 am Cian turned up. I carried Shea back into his own bed and Cian stayed with us. At 4 am Lola cried. She needed to go to the bathroom but was scared of the dark, so Daddy had to stand guard. Each time it took ages to fall back asleep again, and what should have been a long sleep until 6.10 am turned out to be much too little.

The run on Thursday was fine. 10 slow and easy miles were on the program, and passed without incident. I can’t think of anything to write, apart from the fact that I managed to get my lowest heart rate for a run ever, despite the fact that I added 8x100 strides towards the end of the run. I was surprised by how quickly the HR came down each time.

The next night was even worse. Niamh had gone out for a concert, and should have been back around midnight. It also meant that bath time, tooth brushing, story time and putting the unruly brood to bed was left to me alone, which was stressful enough. But when Cian woke me at 2:35 am (he wanted to come into our bed) and there was no sign of Niamh I immediately got worried. She didn’t have her mobile phone with her, so I sent some text messages to the friends she had gone out with, and when I didn’t get an answer rang them up after some hesitation (it was nearly 3 am by now). Eventually one of them answered the call and said that Niamh had dropped her off just 5 minutes ago and would be home soon. Sure enough she turned up eventually. I didn’t really say much apart from “never do that to me again” and went back to bed. Unfortunately I was wide awake and couldn’t sleep for another hour. I finally drifted off to sleep around 4 am, but when the alarm went off at 4:30, I didn’t have much more than 4 hours of sleep behind me. I contemplated going back to sleep but eventually got up anyway, got ready and headed out of the door. It was still fairly dark, which is something I haven’t been used to for months, but not enough to require a headlamp.

To be honest, I don’t remember much about the first half of the run. I think I was basically still asleep, but the legs were on autopilot and found the way all by themselves. I had deliberated if I should do a similar run to last week (3 reasonably flat out-and-back segments) or return to my loop around Caragh Lake. I eventually settled for the latter. One loop around the lake is 17 miles and a second loop to Ard-na-Sidhe makes 22 miles, which was just too beautiful to resist. It meant a lot of hills, which worried me because of the pain in my knee on all those downhills, but decided that my knee was getting better and I would be able to run through any pain. This worked out reasonably well. It did hurt, especially on the steep bits, but now I’m convinced that I’m definitely on the way to recovery again, and I need some more hills for my running. All those flat miles won’t cut it.

I kinda woke up for the second half, and started noticing the various life forms around me, apart from the usual assortments of cats, dogs and birds I came across millions of gnats (annoying), sheep (panicked), cows (mating, not a pretty sight), horses (beautiful), rabbits (fast) and one badger (dead). Eventually a few early risers on their way to work appeared on the road as well. The run went well enough, much better than last week when the second half had turned more and more into a death march with each mile. On the other hand I was much slower than anticipated, and certainly slower than it felt like. I guess the sleepwalking first half was mostly responsible for that, I remember looking at my watch after 8 miles, seeing 1:08, managing to calculate the pace (8:30) in my head and being surprised at the slow progress. I resisted the temptation to speed up, especially as the long 3-mile climb was about to start, which didn’t exactly help the average pace. I guess I should be reasonably happy with the second half of the run, which must have been around 8:10 to make up a bit of time. That’s still slow, but it was a long run, and after so little sleep I won’t split hairs. Maybe I should take all those hills into account. They were bound to slow me down.

I think I’ll sleep in on the weekend. Any screaming kids will be Niamh’s problem (yeah, right!).

19 Jul: 10 miles, 1:24:43, 8:28 pace, avg. HR 135
20 Jul: 22 miles, 3:03:41, 8:20 pace, avg. HR 145