mike[space] dot net

A few months ago, I competed in my first 10k, and I enjoyed the experience so much that I decided I was capable of upping my game even further, and began toying with the idea of doing a half marathon. Unfortunately my brother took my toying seriously, and badgered me until I signed up for the Marlow Half Marathon, which it transpires is quite hilly (he was quite quiet about that).

A typical Sunday morning will often see me sleep right through it, stagger blearily from my bed around lunchtime and weigh up the pros and cons of heading to the local cafe for a greasy spoon breakfast. So it was with some trepidation that I set my alarm for 7AM on Saturday night, knowing that I was planning on heading into the centre of London for my first 10k race. A night of disturbed sleep followed, my dreams filled with delayed buses, missed trains and various other time related concerns.

April was a pretty crappy month for my running, with only four runs logged, one of which was actually an abject failure. So for May, I am endeavouring to recapture my running mojo. I basically concluded that the problems that I had developed were twofold.

With apologies to Haruki Marukami for the blatant theft of the title. This post was originally going to be looking back over the last year, but it's wound up solely discussing running. So I'll try and get to the rest of my life in the next few days.

After almost 3 weeks of recovery, I have finally got back out to run round the park. Having taken a break just before twisting my ankle, it's been pretty much a month since I ran regularly, and it has been getting on my nerves more and more. This reached a peak at the Gyro 10k, which I went to watch but could not participate in. Whilst it was great to watch my friends doing so well, it was pretty depressing to not run in the race that had been my goal.

Hooray, this morning I actually managed to run the required distance for my upcoming run!! It really does seem that running in km is easier than in miles - that or the fact that I didn't get on the treadmill 5 minutes after getting out of bed. I dropped the pace slightly to 10 kph (I had been at 10.5 before), and surprised myself by actually being comfortable for bits of the run. I won't deny I wasn't willing the distance to pass, but there was definitely a period where I hit my stride - I wasn't even massively out of breath. Well, until the the last 0.5km when I did a "sprint" finish at 11kph.

All in all feeling much more confident about the race, and feeling a whole lot better about my running in general. Which is nice ...

The race seems to be suddenly drawing a lot closer, and I still haven't actually run the required distance - this morning I hit the treadmill at the hotel, and whilst I managed just under 20 mins of running, my numbers were all a lot lower with everything in miles instead of kilometres. On the plus side, I couldn't bring myself to eat anything unhealthy for breakfast after the exercise - so I had a croissant and have a banana sitting on my desk uneaten ;-)

This could get ugly ...