Dear Diary…
Met the lads (no-one) in the beautiful morning sun (evening, pitch black and raining) for the traditional Sunday ‘long run’ (3.19km – no, that’s not a misplaced decimal).
It’s day one. The comeback has begun.
Ran loops (four, since you ask) of Fitz Park in Keswick. Foot felt fine. Doesn’t feel quite so fine now, an hour and a bit later, but nothing too drastic.
It was my first run since mid-November. It felt it. Sluggish and odd. Laborious.
Necessary.
Got two days off to see how the foot responds, then, I guess, it’s another 15′ or so on Wednesday.
Have you watched that Andy Murray documentary on Netflix? It’s actually ok. I got told I am exactly like him. Not a multi-millionaire tennis player, but a dour, morose bastard.
Anyway, he said a really interesting thing (amongst many other interesting things – I like the guy) that made the old ears prick up. To paraphrase it was something along the lines of…”I don’t feel like I deserve this (his career-threatening hip injury), I’ve done everything I’ve been told to do; I’ve done everything right…”
I really empathise with that sentiment. I seem to keep getting injured. I eat right. I train as diligently as I can with a coach who I trust implicitly. I sleep well and feel like I look after myself. It’s arrogant (I did warn you in the last blog) and very much a ‘first-world’ problem, but I’m in a very fortunate position at this stage in my life that running is one of the main, and only, things that occupies any place on my stress chart. I can’t change that fact, and nor would I want to, as selfish as that sounds (as an aside you may not agree with that, but then ask yourself, when people preach on with self-righteous glee about equality, whose equality do they want? Middle-class students marching in down marble-fronted London streets aren’t shouting for equality that would bring them in-line with working-class people are they? Equality is an upward desire, never downward).
Yet.
Yet, here I am. Writing this self-serving bollocks, not truly understanding just how lucky I am.
