I can say unequivocally that I did not want to run, such that I sat in the sun drinking coffee and avoiding it for a couple of hours this morning. The excuses that I offered myself included a stiff back from an uncomfortable night bivouacking Thursday, exacerbated by bending over a craft table mounting & framing ten of Karen’s photos yesterday for her exhibition which opens near Old St tube next week; a dodgy-feeling left knee which is probably showing accumulated strain from running with a rucsac for the last few weeks; a general sense of tiredness.
At the end of the day though, none of these feature in the Sussex Men’s League list of allowable excuses so I finally got with the programme and launched myself out the door.
Since I had worn my battered old runners on Thursday night, for the sake of prudence, this was the inaugural outing of my new Saucony splodge. I wore my thicker spring/autumn socks to pad them out to give them a good trial (based on the likelihood of slightly swollen feet in the Alps)… and quickly forgot that I was wearing them!
Other than pausing to say hi to BeerMatt, m route was unremarkable, following the pavement for the oft-followed five miles to the other side of Hassocks… without any hint of a rucsac to give my back a chance to recover. I wasn’t exactly running quickly and it took me 47 minutes to get to the turn marker.
My body felt as if it has relaxed a little on the return leg and I began to focus on landing on my outside heel and pushing off from my big toe as physio Andrea Wright taught me… not that I was running any much quicker. Around the 8-mile mark I ran into a very late April shower and within a few paces I was drenched through, such that my phone became as slippery as a bar of soap!
I ran on regardless of the impulse to soap-up and reached home in 45 minutes.
So 10 miles in 1.32, my back feeling looser, but left ankle having come out in sympathy with its adjacent knee and still feeling generally tired. So what’s new!