Just Like Heaven

I can't remember if it was for Christmas or my birthday but Niamh gave me 2 tickets for The Cure in Malahide in June, which also solved the dilemma if I should go to see The Cure or Metallica, which for some inexplicable reason were on at the exact same time. While Metallica would have been my natural choice, Slane is such a nightmare to come home from afterwards, and The Cure happen to be just about the only band both Niamh and me like (we tried to think of another one and couldn't come up with any!), so off the Malahide it was. The concert was great, and while I was struck by the fact that virtually the entire crowd was about my age (including the guys on stage, of course) I appreciated the fact that afterwards we just walked to the Dart station and straight away got on a train that brought us all the way to Bray. Metallica would have seen me back home by 3 o'clock in the morning at best.

Anyway, this was a pretty good week. I did a modest workout on Tuesday, something I have tried and failed to do on several occasions because I found it hard to believe just how modest a modest workout would be, but I finally found a sustainable pace. maybe a tad too sustainable, but it left me free to run a few extra miles on Wednesday by running both into work as well as back, which went much better than expected.

Two more commutes on Thursday and Friday were starting to feel rather heavy on the legs, especially on Friday because a run in the morning after an evening run the day before always feel tough, but I was amazed by the difference another day made - a mere 24 hours later on Saturday morning the legs felt fantastic!

For that I headed for the hills again, well, just the one hill in form of Bray Head, but to make up for that I ran it 5 times. At the start I actually had to reign myself in, I felt so good that the legs were just itching to take off. Just as I was thinking of doing 6 repeats this morning, I started to stumble a few times during the fifth ascend, so I reasoned that I was getting tired after all and binned the sixth repeat, mostly because I didn't want to trip and smash my face in. Running on stony trails is tricky enough for me, short-sighted as I am, and fatigued legs with compromised perception is asking for trouble.

As mentioned that was followed by The Cure concert, and great as that was it meant several extra hours on my feet and by Sunday I did notice that, alright. So I decided against a run to Dun Laoghaire because I didn't want to find myself dead on my feet 10 hilly miles away from home and headed for Shanganah Park instead, doing a few laps until I would start to feel tired. That was definitely a good move and after 10 miles I could definitely feel the form starting to deteriorate and the breathing to become more laboured, and I was home after just under 2 hours. I really don't think any longer would have been a good idea.

It still added up to over 80 miles for the week, which is just about the mileage I was always able to maintain comfortably, so I will see if that's still the case in the next few weeks.