No running allowed....
I guess you might consider a running blog by someone who isn't allowed to run a bit of a strange concept.
I admit it's far from ideal.
I did run. Sort of. I staggered and wheezed my way in the dark and rain and snow. Through energy-sapping gales and bitter cold that burnt my throat and left me with a hacking cough for days.
Does that sound exciting? In my head it was. In my head I was battling the elements in some remote location, looking forward to better weather when I would be leaping gazelle-like down leafy trails. In reality I was stumbling round the local park, leaving the occasional dog-walker wondering if they should phone me an ambulance.
And the furthest I ran? A mile. Once.
It wasn't meant to be so difficult. Ok, so I was useless at sports as a kid (my one, very minor, sporting achievement being immediately followed - and somewhat overshadowed - by me vomiting all over myself), but I'm not overweight, and whilst I'd spent the last twelve years sat behind a desk for much of my week, I walked a reasonable amount, did zumba twice a week, hot yoga once a week and occasionally some swimming. Running seemed a reasonable addition, I even had aspirations to combine it with the twice-weekly dog walk I did (unfortunately a husky or collie is more suited to running than your average Lhasa apso - although I reckon she could give Usain Bolt a run for his money over the 100 metres....). So I bought a pair of trainers. I set off for a run. 2 minutes later my legs felt like they were made out of a combination of jelly and dark matter. I went home, and relegated the trainers to walking for the next year. Clearly running was not something I could do.
Then I met a boy. A slightly insane boy, with a real passion for running, who'd just completed a 20-mile run as part of his training for his first marathon. We'll call him Scott, seeing as that's his name, he's not innocent and certainly doesn't need protecting. He told me about when he first started running, how he ran for on a treadmill for 2 minutes, then 3 minutes, then 4..... (you get the picture) until, after several months of pain (and progressing to the outdoors), it became fun. And suddenly the idea dawned that maybe I could run, that it was actually normal for it to be so hard at first. So at the end of January this year I dug out the trainers again...
And this time, with a few faltering starts and amended plans, I persevered for about 4 months. Until the wheels fell off. Or more precisely my right foot and achilles packed in. The ugly details of my journey to the physio's couch (and the reason for my current running hiatus) are for the next post, but during my brief running period Scott gave me a copy of Christopher McDougall's excellent Born to Run. It was hugely inspirational and still my favourite running book (I've devoured 5 or 6 since then), but it's a book about ultra-runners and whilst it instilled in me the dream of running long distances, I was desperate to find something that I could relate to, something about those really horrible first weeks/months where you suspect it would be quicker (and less painful) for you to walk rather than run, when your running takes significantly less time than it takes you to wrestle yourself into your sports-bra. A few books claimed to satisfy this need, but in truth they would indeed give a suitably graphic description of that first trip out, the horror, the shame, the breathlessness, the nausea (it's amazing how much you can achieve in a hundred yards...), but then tended to then skip blithely to the author entering their first half marathon. Hang on - what happened to the struggle to the first 5k? The first mile? The first 5 minutes???
So with my enforced running sabbatical meaning I'll be pretty much starting from scratch, I decided to write it myself. If all goes well and I, quite literally, manage to get my butt into gear in the next 2 weeks, my physio says I can start running again. This will be my running diary.
my running track
