"No one is stopping you from doing what you want to do
No one is stopping you now, stopping you now..."
Axl Rose (Guns N Roses), Shackler's Revenge
Those were just some lyrics I noticed while I was running the last half mile of tonights run, and I thought they were appropriate!
I really, really, really, really, really (did I get that across?!) didn't want to go out for a run tonight. My friend cancelled on me as his daughter has chicken pox, and I just felt lethargic. Not tired, or sore or anything else - it was just a mental thing about not going. If I had given myself any choice at the beginning of this running idea, I wouldn't have gone out tonight, but the fact that I've invested 7 days into this so far, I can't throw it away now. And do you know what?...
I actually had a good run tonight!!
3 miles on the dot (I was coming up a never-ending hill at the end and I told myself if I ran all the way up I could stop at 3 miles). 7m45 or so average (need to find the numbers later), but real running. The hills didn't kill me, and I wasn't knackered to start with.
The interesting thing is that I was working at home today, and seemed to spend most of the day eating - sod the calories, I just ate everything I could find! I therefore think that quite a lot of the tiredness associated with the running is the limiting of calories.
My left knee felt slightly odd to start with, but my wife bought me a support bandage yesterday and I wore it in the evening and all night and it seems to have helped. I did however get home from tonights run, do some stretches, and then find my left calf is very tight on the inside and it almost hurts to walk. I'm going to give it a really good massage as I can feel knots in the muscle and hopefully this'll sort things out.
I'm thinking of treating myself to a sports massage. I've always wanted one, and I thought what better time to do it than in the middle of this daft experiment! I might look around tomorrow and see if I can get some recommendations for local ones...
About the run - it was a new(ish) route tonight - I did one of my normal ones the other way round with a bit of a twist at the end which left me ending on a steep up hill. It always feels different doing a run the other way round - I'm a creature of habit and normally want to check my time, so I don't really like it generally, but when you're just after distance and not time it's really nice to see things from the other side. The start of the run was good - nice and easy and I felt bouncy. In fact it was good until a hill at just before 2 miles, then it started getting a bit harder. But I still had the energy to run uphill at the end, so overall it felt really good.
I did remind myself of something that was worrying me a little at the start of January. I've found that if you run the same distance regularly (I usually run 4.5 miles at work a few times a week), then you get comfortable running about 70% of that distance and the last bit is always hard. So, if you want to get good at running 10k, you need to run at least 8 or so miles regularly I reckon. So, doing a month of 3 miles will make me comfortable at doing 2 miles, but I'm going to find it hard to do anything more in February (how do you pronounce February??!!). So, once I get to (or near) 14 days I'm going to make a couple of the runs each week at least 5 miles and see how I get on with that.
One last thought - if you're reading this and I don't know you, can you stick a comment on the blog? Anything you like - it'd just be nice to hear!
Ta ra until tomorrow...
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