I ballsed up my half marathon plans a bit. I didn’t get around. Not even nearly.
My intention was to do an 11 mile run and two 12 miles in the run up to a half marathon today. I managed one 11 and one not-very-nice 12 (Nipple chafe. The struggle is real). Then I was thrown by a week of toothache & feeling sorry for myself, followed by general busyness/laziness.
Problem one was that I seem to have some aversion to running at weekends, or generally before about 7pm. I don’t know whether it’s psychological or what but I never feel quite as comfortable. It’s probably something to do with how long it’s been since lunch but… I’m still working that one out.
Problem two, I’m a bit angry. It’s getting more and more difficult to find good, safe routes because of the winter darkness and the lack of effective lighting. There’s a bridge that would be really convenient to cross that has two motion-triggered lights one of which doesn’t work at all and one that comes on late and turns off before you’re gone. The 11 mile run I mentioned actually involved a death-defying pitch-black 400m or so down a road which I expected to have a path and at least some lighting – but actually had neither.
Finally, I left a bottle of water on the route at a point I cross twice, and by the time I’d got back, 30 minutes later, some busybody had taken it upon themselves to clear it up. Not the rest of the sodding litter, just my water. That was the proverbial straw tonight.
Rant over though; we all have our off days and this was one of mine. I looked back at the ‘telemetry’ and I set off too fast anyway. So regardless of Woking’s pesky canal tidy freaks, and its tepid attitude to effectual street lighting, I mightn’t have made it all the way around anyway.
So if you’ve made it through this far through this half marathon of a blog post, you’ll probably realise that I’m going to try and actually go the extra mile and push my longest run up to 13.1 miles. Soon. Next month.
In fact, the whole reason I’m sitting here writing this is that I am truly gutted that I didn’t get myself round before the end of September. I probably would have set myself an interesting 30 day challenge for October but now I just want to make amends for tonight.
The other thing I want to sort out is my 10k. I’ve still only done one sub 45 minutes and I really want to be able to break 45 consistently. The sooner I get the half-marathon elephant out of the room the sooner I’ll get myself onto a more structured 10k program. It’s 6 runs a week and it’s sitting on my desk. I can’t wait to get into it.
So that leads on to what else I’m going to try and do this October: start being conscious about my diet again. I’m aware that on off ‘dieting’ is a shitty idea and what one really ought to aspire to is long term healthy lifestyle. I was being quite balanced for a long while but I’ve let it slip and gorged recently. So I’m going to try and get back to where I was which will involve me doing what I did originally to lose weight.
I’ve got rid of fat from everywhere except my belly, yet whenever I do heavy weeks of exercise it still comes off my arms or somewhere other than my stomach. Ideally I’d take all that weight off the front and build it back up as leg, core and arm muscle. Maybe that will be enough to find the extra time.
But I need to actually concentrate to do that. Less eating out, less junk and more doing other things to keep my mind off junk… I haven’t lost any weight in ages. So here goes nothing.
By the way, the LP is done and submitted so I’m just waiting for it to appear on the digital download services now!