From the ashes

It’s been several months, yes. What happened? I’d like to blame this on the bout of appendicitis I had in early March, which led to subsequent chopping out of said appendix and subsequent recovery from said chopping out. But I know that would be a pile of crap. My last entry was about a month prior to that. No, I’ve been neglecting my blog for a far less understandable reason.

Basically? I lost all my enthusiasm for running. I burned out. Sad, no? I told myself I didn’t have anything interesting to write about because I wasn’t doing anything interesting, while ignoring the fact that nothing I do is really interesting anyway, but it’s my job to turn this dull and meaningless chore that is running into a fun-filled adventure.

I would get up in the morning and run, but it was getting later and later because I just couldn’t drag myself out of bed when I needed to go. My runs would get shorter and shorter because I actually had things to do later on, which was why I tried to get up earlier. It was a cavalcade of fail, ladies and gentlemen and other. Maybe this bout of potentially life-threatening infected internal organ nonsense was actually the kick in the ass I needed. Wait, not the ass. A kick in the stomach? Yeah, felt like one.

I was told when I was in the hospital that I wouldn’t be able to work out for a month. This wasn’t an ideal situation, and even though you’d think I’d be relieved to take a little running holiday (and also miss the Canberra Half Marathon, incidentally) it was endlessly frustrating.

It was only about three weeks before I started to work out again, albeit carefully, and at the start of this month I jumped back into the running with newfound gusto and also a newfound lack of fitness. Wow, I deteriorated really, really quickly. Week before last, I could barely manage 5 kilometres. Last week, I managed 10 in a relatively decent time but couldn’t manage sprints. This morning I did 10 kilometres without a rest, and although I’m getting back in stride I still hated it on behalf of my lungs.

One fun part was that I decided to run the last kilometre as fast as I could. Managed half a km before a collapsed lung… Okay, that’s a bit dramatic. It just hurt, so I stop. In any case, I managed the 500m in 2 minutes flat. Not bad.

I have to go out shortly, so I’ll cut this short but I guess half the battle was actually sitting down in front of my computer to write anything. It’s hard to admit that you’ve been lazy when the admission takes effort.

Next time, I’ll get in some egotistical bullshite about how good looking I think I am. That’ll be something to look forward to.

Or maybe I’ll talk about pirate costumes.

At the very least, I intend to come back. I can work out every day, and have done so for the last 20 days (I may talk about that, actually) so I know I can form habits if I’m committed enough.