Going the extra mile (or not)

So, it wasn’t a cold, but instead a weird fevery-virus type affair that lasted a couple of days and completely wiped me out . I went for three days without running, the most since my post- marathon recovery week in November. On Saturday morning I was still feeling shady, but decided to risk a short run in the spirit of  ‘kill or cure’. As I’m not writing this from an afterlife where ghosts sit around drinking wine and blogging  (imagine that), it was happily the latter.

I don’t think running is generally to be recommended as a cure for illness, but it definitely does wonders for my mental wellbeing. I am not good at being ill, by which I mean that a) I’m not ill very often, thankfully, and b) I struggle to embrace the advantages of illness. On normal days I fantasize about sitting at home or in the garden with my book, sipping cold beverages or painting my toenails while watching episodes of Monk. When I am ill I feel too guilty to switch on the TV and draw the curtains for fear that the view of the garden might prevent my headache from reaching its true potential. Illness destroys all my positivity; running restores it.

This morning no trace of illness remained and I thought, what better to aid full recovery than a 14 mile run? It’s the longest run in my training plan and I might feel like a fraud if I didn’t at least attempt it. As it was, we didn’t manage it. Mr Notajogger and I plodded around our old half-marathon route and, from about 6 miles in, the idea of tacking on the extra mile at the end began to feel more and more extravagant. I mean, what would it actually achieve? We will never know, as we stopped our watches outside Nando’s on Stroud Green Road (the traditional end of our 13 mile runs during marathon training) at 1 hour 46 minutes. I want to knock 12 minutes off that in three weeks’ time – maybe we should have done that extra mile…