Thanks

Just when I thought things were returning back to normal, my work colleagues ambushed me today with a gathering at my desk, handing me a congratulations card as well as a big bottle of bubbly. I could only mumble something like "thanks, this is really unexpected" in return. I did appreciate the kindness, which almost made up for the embarrassment.

But for some reason the episode did remind me how the runner in such a race get all the kudos while the crew gets nothing basically, apart from the gratitude of their own runner. This is rather unfair, the job of the crew is very tough, standing around for 24 hours while constantly serving an increasingly grumpy, whiny and later totally zombified runner would not be my idea of a fun day out, never mind the fact that our crews in that particular race had to deal with 14 hours of torrential rain (and if you think they all hid in their tents, it turned out that the majority of tents could not cope with the amount of rainfall). So, in short, I want to say thank you to all the crews for ultra runners, not just mine but all of them. Without you, we wouldn't have been able to do our race.

Ok, back to my own running. I might have re-started running a week ago, but would not describe what I'm doing as training. While it might do something for my body, the main benfit is keeping me sane; had I been not running for 2 weeks, Niamh would most likely have kicked me out of the house by now. Running 5 miles a day isn't really noteworthy, and running the same 5 mile stretch every day is even less so. I was slightly tempted to do 8 miles this morning on my preferred Caragh Lake route but decided against it because my knee had been sore on Thursday.

That knee is definitely the one part of my body that suffered the most damage during the 24 hours. Some days I can hardly feel it at all, on other days it can be quite sore, so it's hard to say how the recovery is going but I'm fairly sure that on the whole it's gradually getting better. I've had slight knee troubles before and back then it went away after a period of easy running. I'm obviously hoping for the same again.

One other thing I have noticed is that I tend to get really tired once or twice a day, including during office hours, which isn't entirely ideal as you can imagine. I do wonder if it's a sign that my endocrine system is still under stress following the 24 hours race, but all I can do is to make sure that I take things easy, not just when running but in every aspect of my life. I'm trying to do just that, as much as I can while still having a full time job and 4 young children.

I had one unexpected problem when adding my race into my online log. Marathonguide.com refused to accept both the 24 hours time and the 126.1 miles distance. In the end I had to split the run data in two. It's not particularly remarkable, but as a computer programmer myself I can imagine the discussion that went into that piece of code. "Longest run? Let's set it to 100 miles. Surely there won't ever be anyone stupid enough to run longer than that!". Which just goes to show that if you try and make things idiot proof, the universe always come up with a better idiot.

18 Jul

5 miles, 40:52, 8:10 pace, HR 141

19 Jul

5 miles, 40:07, 8:01 pace, HR 139

20 Jul

5 miles, 41:15, 8:15 pace, HR 140