The Curse of Ennui

I never did manage to run 20 km last weekend. I felt like crap, as anticipated, and decided that 14 was long enough for me. I thought I’d pick up the slack this week. Didn’t quite turn out as planned, either. I did run home two days in the last week, but not very quickly or energetically. And yesterday, I didn’t run at all.

I could beat myself up about this, but I don’t think anything would be gained by it. I could get upset about how lazy I’ve been with my eating, but what is obsessing about my weight going to solve? I haven’t gained any weight, not really. I don’t need to lose any more weight, even though I occasionally think about those last two kilograms.

I’ve got the Ben Donohoe fun run next weekend. I’ll run home a couple of days this week, maybe even ride to work a couple of days. I’ll use a bit of willpower when it comes to snacks, or then again I might not. And I’ll try to blog a bit more often. But I’ll try not to feel guilty if I don’t. For now. I just don’t need the guilt right now.

Foreshadowing

Well, it’s twenty five past eleven on a Friday night, I’m drunk and there’s probably at least half an hour left of this movie. I still intend to get up and run twenty kilometres early in the morning. Will I succeed? Chances are that I will, but it will be painful and I’ll regret my late night. But as I lack the ability to turn back the clock, I’ll just have to harden up and deal with it. Let’s see what happens.

Needs moar content.

Time it took to run home today: 41:02

Time it took to run home on Monday: 40:09

I promise I’ll make the effort to write a post with actual content at some point. When you’re boring even yourself, you know you’ve gotta change things up a bit.

I ran home on Monday. It was good. Entirely uneventful. Went to Zumba on Tuesday. It was awesome. My butt is still sore because at one point I ran backwards at velocity into a metal pole. And yes, there is no way of phrasing that without it sounding just the slightest bit suspicious.

The weather is starting to get warmer, and sooner or later I’m going to have to give up the pack, abandon my stuff at work overnight and run with my bumbag for the essentials. As the weather heats up, I get back to wishing I had a completely flat stomach. It’s good, better than it used to be, but when I run I can’t hold my core in so I look a bit... Well. I know I shouldn’t focus on that, and I’m sure I look ridiculous enough when running, but man would it feel good to be able to run in a crop top in the middle of summer and be confident about it.

I am so hungry right now. Oh man.

Distance: 20.14 km

Time: 2:22:46

This morning I managed to drag myself out of bed at 6:30, and I was out the door by 7 am. It was raining just a little, it was frighteningly windy and it was absolutely freezing. I must have looked like an absolute tool, with my hood pulled up over my baseball cap and tied under my chin like I was Kenny from South Park or something, but I had the notion that my ears may well fall off if exposed to that wind. I took it easy, kept it slow, and I think the time attests to that. My average heart rate was 140, which is sort of what I was going for.

We’ve been having some pretty awful weather here in Canberra over the last week or so, and at one point I saw a huge dead tree that had snapped in half during the high winds, both halves still vaguely attached, and the top half sort of gently resting on another tree. It looked like a broken twig, even though it was a tall gum tree. I knew it had only snapped this week, as it could obviously fall any time it felt like doing so, and someone would hopefully come and lop it down before that happened. There were branches down on the path, and little mini-floods everywhere I looked. I was only thankful that it wasn’t raining any harder.

At one point, for about two minutes, it actually snowed. I wouldn’t have minded it, if all the rain had been replaced by snow. Snow is at least a novelty.

I think I might have to keep my long runs at 20k for a while. I didn’t feel too tired at the end of today’s run. In fact, I ran another five hundred metres or so after stopping the timer at a fairly brisk pace, not quite a sprint. I wasn’t quite home yet, but walking was boring. I just think that two and a half hours is quite an investment, and anything longer than this will probably require food of some description. As it is, I’ve burned quite a few calories. According to my heart rate monitor, I burned 7500 or so kilojoules (about 1800 calories) in this morning’s run and there’s nothing as inspirational as feeding that information into my calorie tracking software and having it tell me I need to eat another 13219 kilojoules (or 3162 calories) today.

Oh. Is that all? I guess two and a half day’s worth of calories will have to do me for the day. I feel so deprived. :P

Sometimes the tough times seem more like the truth.

I haven’t written since Monday, even though I ran home on Thursday and I didn’t even forget my Garmin. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t easy and it hurt like hell. I don’t know why it should be easier for me to write about the easy runs, the uneventful runs, the runs that all blend together, but I find it harder to talk about those runs that tell me the most about where I am right now and what I need to focus on to get where I need to go.

It was raining on Wednesday. After Zumba on Tuesday night I might not have been particularly enthused about the thought of running home in any case, but when I heard the rain pelting down on Wednesday morning, that was definitely the clincher. I get in the habit of thinking that I’m fit and I can handle pretty much anything, but every now and then I overdo it and really notice it the next day, or even the day after the next. I had a great workout at Zumba, but even now I have some residual twinges in my legs and my arms. So I took Wednesday off.

Thursday was fine, a wee bit warm, even. The only thing that I thought might be an issue was that I could barely walk, let alone run. Wednesday, I hurt a bit. Thursday, I ached all over and my inner thighs were so tight I felt myself walking like a penguin most of the day with my feet turned out. I assumed that after half a kilometre things would stretch themselves out and I’d be fine, but I didn’t anticipate being in ABSOLUTE AGONY most of the way. My back was dripping with sweat, my shoulders screaming from the weight of my fully laden pack. I felt like I was going to snap a tendon any moment. The run took a couple of minutes longer than usual, which actually doesn’t sound all that bad in retrospect. Given how terrifying the entire run was, I would have expected five minutes longer, so I should be happy with two, given the repeated walk breaks and extended interlude when I tried to find appropriate music on my iPod. At the time I thought it was vital and necessary to stop and walk to find some music. I know I wasn’t fooling anyone.

What does this run teach me? Maybe I should be stretching a little more carefully after Zumba. Maybe I should have run Wednesday, to prevent everything tightening up. Maybe I didn’t refuel properly. There’s a lot of things I can infer from Thursday’s scary and unpleasant experience. I know I have to expect these sorts of things occasionally.

Tomorrow morning, it will probably still be raining. But I’ll get up, I’ll gear up, and I’ll go for a 20 kilometre run. Whether I will manage to complete it remains to be seen, but I’m going to try my best not to let one bad run get me down.

These hills are pretty hilly, aren't they?

Time it took to run home: 41:14

Running with a heavy pack is annoying and uncomfortable but I think I’m getting used to it. I didn’t really think about it on today’s run, even though I had my big heavy work boots in there. Sometimes I just leave them at work because the thought of an extra kilogram makes my back twinge in remembered agony. The hills still seem nasty (or maybe I should say ‘hill’ because it’s really only one very long and steep hill) but I’m also getting used to that. Every run isn’t easy, but today’s was less annoying than most. I took my time, chilled out, listened to my audiobook. Just finished one Charlaine Harris book and started the next. I think it’s Definitely Dead. Not sure.

I stood on a piece of glass at some point, maybe here at home, and there’s an unpleasant little gash on the sole of my foot. Whether that will effect my running or tomorrow night’s Zumba class remains to be seen. All I know is I’m really looking forward to Zumba. It seems like a lot more than two weeks since last term ended.

OW. Ow. Ow. Also yay, but ow.

Distance: 17.64 km

Time: 2:00:45

It wasn’t an easy run this morning. My right ankle is still feeling a little odd at the outset, and I’m starting to worry that it might be wear in my shoes that’s causing it. I don’t want to buy new shoes until about maybe February or March next year because I don’t think my Lunar Glides could possibly have worn out to any extent yet. I think I got them in December or January. They should be fine for months yet.

I realised only about five or six kilometres in that my energy would not last. I realised that my tank was only half full, and depleting rapidly. I don’t have to think very hard about it to know why. Have I been fuelling myself properly? Probably not. Have I been tired? Definitely. This week, including this morning’s run, I’ve run approximately 38.4 kilometres.

“That’s nothing.” The mean little voice inside me says. The one that equates change with loss of control, and progress with risk of injury. “That’s nowhere even close to your lofty marathon goal, and it took a whole WEEK. You’re never going to go the distance. Give up.”

This voice is quieter now than it used to be, and I find no difficulty in ignoring it most of the time. I’ve got more than six months to build up my distance. The reason this week FEELS so much harder is that I’ve been building my weekly mileage a bit quickly.

Last week, in total, I ran about 31.6 kilometres. The week before, it was about 26. Going from 26 to 31 to 38 doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s more than 10% each week, which is the recommended increase to prevent injury. Does that mean that I’ll go slower? Maybe, I’d like to think so, but probably not. Apart from this morning’s run which was so hard it verged on not fun, I really enjoy this whole running lark. It’s one thing I’m having no difficulty in achieving. It’s the easy win, and it really pumps me up.

I wanted to push through to 20k this morning, but decided that would be overkill on top of overkill, and turned back. Next week, maybe. I’ll see.

Running under pressure

Time it took me to run home: 39:10

It was a fairly quick run home tonight, and it feels like a shorter run than it used to, which is good. Building up the distance is still going to be hard, but if 40 or so minutes can feel like a quick jog, four and a half hours can’t be all that much harder, can it?

I also ran on Tuesday, but forgot my Garmin and apart from needing to go to the toilet quite badly and having to stop twice during the run as a result, it was uneventful.

At the moment, I’m listening to one of those motivational audiobooks, in an attempt to find something that works with the stress that I’m carrying around at the moment. I’ll get through the book in the next week or two, and hopefully there’s something that I can use to help me. I don’t have much of a problem with making goals, just a problem with the day to day to-do lists and motivating myself toward the longer term objectives. The only thing on my long term big goal list that I’ve even been working on is the big marathon goal, and I don’t know why. Is it easier to lengthen my long run and run home from work twice a week than it is to get a book finished and edit it? Maybe. I think I’m afraid of starting something that seems too daunting to finish. Maybe I have more faith in my running ability and my body than I do in my writing talent (or lack of talent, as the case may be).

Climb every mountain. Or at least every other mountain.

Distance: 8.74 km

Time: 1:05:55

This morning I set out to run up Black Mountain.

Predictably, I got lost.

I think I was supposed to follow the road a bit longer before turning onto the trail uphill, but I had no idea where I was going. I ran up a really steep, really narrow path, trying not to trip over on the loose gravel and fall flat on my face. I was keeping an eye out for Black Mountain Tower, which I hoped would be nearby. But then I got to a high point at which I could see past the trees. And I looked over at the other mountain. And there was the tower.

Fail.

Okay, so it wasn’t really another mountain. It was another part of the same mountain. But it was a high part of the mountain, and in order to get there I’d have to climb down the half of the mountain I was on. Rather than get even more lost, I turned around and headed back. I had to walk down because the loose gravel was terrifying.

I’ll definitely try running the mountain again at some time in the future, but if the real trail is as scary as the trail I took today, I probably won’t do it again.

This is where the fun part starts.

Distance: 15.79 km

Time: 1:46:33

This run was dedicated to my friend Scarlett, who is recovering from surgery. Big hugs from me, and I hope you get better soon.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill

I’m starting to get into the longer distance territory now, and I can feel it. There’s a transition when the muscles in my legs start to feel really tight and uncomfortable. Soon, when I’ve added another five kilometres to my long run, maybe I’ll get into the zone where they stop being tight and go slack and baggy, making it even harder to run.

My right ankle felt a little odd when I started out this morning, like my foot was striking on a strange angle and it was pulling on the inner side of the ankle. The feeling cleared up after a kilometre or two, and because there weren’t any other little niggles bothering me, most of the run was without incident. It started raining at the halfway point, but it never got past a sort of half-hearted sprinkle, and it gave up entirely about half an hour later out of boredom.

My planned trail wasn’t quite as long as I expected it to be, so I took a slight detour and extended the run, if not quite to the 16 km I planned, at least half a km closer than it would have been. I’m probably going to have to find another path son, because when I get to the 20 km run, I’ll probably have to circle Lake Gininderra twice and that’ll get old really fast.

On Monday I’m hoping to take a jog up Black Mountain. I don’t know how achievable it is, but there’s nothing gained by not giving it a try.

Hope everybody enjoys their long weekend, and if you should happen to not be having a long weekend, my most heartfelt sympathy goes out to you.