Fallen Warrior

A few years ago someone posted a question on a popular Irish discussion forum about falling over while running. I remember thinking there must be something wrong with that guy if he keeps falling over while running on roads. Oh my, how I have changed my mind! The difference is all about running on roads in Kerry, where you actually do run on roads, and in the greater Dublin area, where you mostly run on sidewalks. And since for some daft reason they a) construct sidewalks out of concrete blocks that often don't fit together particularly well b) think that they don't have to maintain them, they become a serious trip hazard. Since moving here I must have stumbled over some minuscule but virtually invisible step about once a week, and on a handful of occasions I have taken a full spill, including once that sidelined me for 6 weeks with injury earlier this year.

I had yet another one on Monday and my right knee looked rather gruesome, together with some serious lacerations on both hands. There will always be a part of me left behind in Shankill, though Niamh was more worried that some part of Shankill will now forever be left inside of me because the wounds looked so dark and dirty. A week on I guess the risk of infection might have subsided, though I'll bear the scars for a while longer, but at least this time I didn't get injured, which is definitely good news.

Apart from that little drama it was a week similar to the last few. I did manage to run a bit over 80 miles and I did a long cycle with the group from work on Tuesday as well. Most of the week I did feel pretty well, though the legs were a bit tired on Wednesday after that long cycle. However, I did get it wrong over the weekend.

I did another workout on Saturday in Bray's People's Park, this time doing half laps fast(-ish) with the second half of each lap as recovery. The idea was to work a bit on my leg turnover and half laps should do that better than full laps. As always I left after feeling that I had one more lap in me, but actually I thought I had done six when looking at the data afterwards revealed I had done only five! Apart from that I was pleased with the workout, going at pretty much the same pace with each repeat and the effort felt right, even though the HR never rose above 164, which I cannot quite explain - I seem to have lost the ability to raise my HR over the last year!

The drawback of that was that I started Sunday's long run on already tired legs, and I chose to run to Dun Laoghaire and turn around after 10 miles. This can work both ways - when you're tired you might curse yourself for being still so far away from home on dead legs, but it can work in your favour by not giving you the option of cutting a run short unnecessarily. On the way out I did question if that really was such a good idea, and on the way back home I gradually came to the realisation that this had indeed been a bad idea and the last few miles were a struggle and not pretty. I also passed Norbert out on his own run in the area, though thankfully I was on a downhill stretch at the time and could fake to be moving reasonably well. About a mile from home I had yet another fall, re-opening a few barely healed wounds in my hands but no real damage done. This one was almost certainly due to me being too tired to lift the legs properly any more, but I did curse and "not again" at the time.