Hello. I'm a forty year old runner living in Ealing in West London. I'm hoping that by keeping this blog it will give me both a useful journal of my running activities and general thoughts about the world at large.
I've never kept a blog or even a diary before so will have to see how this goes. I've been reading other runners' blogs and thought how hard can it be? Well, pretty hard since it's taken me months to get from idea to reality. I think the problem is what to write.
Let's start at the beginning. I've been running "properly" for the last three years. Before that I would train for a couple of months for a 10k race and then do nothing else for the rest of the year before the next 10k race the next year. This all stopped in August 2008. I had signed up for the Nike 10k race in London and had trained for three months. Finally crossing the line in 65 minutes my usual pattern would mean hanging up my running shoes for another nine months and digging them out for the next Nike 10k. I have no idea why but this time I decided to carry on running two or three times a week. Before I knew it it was Spring and there were a plethora of races to enter. 10k race times came down and within a few months I was going sub-50 minutes. Progress! After 10k races came the half-marathon which whetted my appetite and I decided to go for the big one. So it came that on April 18th 2010 I found myself lining up for the inaugural Brighton Marathon. All the training came together and 3 hours, 44 minutes and 46 seconds later I found myself crossing the line. I vowed never to run another marathon again. I kept this promise for six weeks and then ran the Chester marathon! In October 2010 I ran the Cardiff Half-Marathon in 1 hour, 35 minutes and 6 seconds.
Then disaster struck.
While on a training run with my girlfriend I pulled my calf muscle. Nothing much I thought! How wrong could I be. Four months later and too many physio sessions to mention I am now able to run again. That's when I thought I could keep a blog to track my road to recovery as well as the road to my next marathon in Chester in October 2011.
The added twist to this is that I am going to change my running style completely and run wearing Vibram Five Fingers Bikila shoes. More on this in a future post but for now let me say that in order to do this I will have to start my training as though I have never run before. From running 6 days a week and averaging about 30 miles I am going to be following a run/walk training programme so my feet, calves and joints all condition themselves slowly. It may get frustrating but I'm hoping that slowly, slowly will indeed catchy monkey.
To that end here's my first training run using the run/walk method in my "finger feet" as my girlfriend calls them:
As you can see I'm not exactly smashing records yet!
That just about wraps up this post. I'm hoping that I'll find more of a style as I write more and more of these posts so if this one feels a little dry then give it time and before you know it I'll be a regular PG Wodehouse!
Having an injury is heartbreaking, because it can stop you from doing what you love, like running. It was a good thing you seeked help immediately. In my opinion, that is an important factor in healing yourself; because the faster they apply the right treatment, the faster you can recover.
ReplyDeleteEmmett Fletcher @ CK Physiotherapy