Long Time No Blog

It's been a while since my last blog, for a few reasons, the main one being an injury I picked up that knocked me out for most of the summer. Not entirely positive what it was, possible stress fracture, possible lower compartment syndrome or tendinitis.

Whatever it was it was a complete pig! Being injured and wanting to run your socks off is the worst thing ever, you don't realise how addictive it is until you can't do it, and there's no miracle cure, you just have to stop running and rest. The only thing I can compare it to is giving up smoking, I was irritable, short tempered depressed you name it, the worst thing was knowing that everything I had worked so hard for, fitness wise was slowly slipping away and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except rest and consume copious amounts of deep heat and Ibuprofen!

Still, looking on the bright side, every cloud and all that, I did a bit of marshaling and this enabled me to see a race from every angle. Right the way from the freak of nature that's an hour ahead of everyone else and looking as fresh as a daisy at mile 60, to the people coming in an hour after the checkpoint has closed and to be brutal shouldn't have been there in the first place. Seeing a race from every angle had a profound effect, I knew where I wanted to be. At the back is grim, reminiscent of the walk of shame after a hard night on the beers, with the sun just creeping over the horizon, birds starting to sing and you hanging so far out of your arse your forehead is scraping along the tarmac, and to top it all you've still got 40 miles to go! No thanks I want to be that freak out front, just once.

I also learnt a lot about injury prevention and treatment, and perhaps more importantly about myself. It doesn't mater if you have a niggle and have to miss a day or maybe two's training, a niggle can quickly become a monumental, incapacitating ball ache! This is exactly what happened to me, being young, green and bloody minded I thought taking a break would spell disaster for my training, so I kept pounding on regardless making things worse and buggering up what was turning out to be a decent level of fitness.

The last lesson injury taught me was to race hard. I'd not been doing too bad, starting to finish races top 10's or so, but I would always be comfortable for the whole race. I've since found that being comfortably uncomfortable the whole way, and racing hard gets so much more out of my races, and who knows, I may one day be that freak at the front.