Relapse; redemption

On Monday night I planned to run. I hadn’t eaten much lunch so I ate a banana at 3.30pm. I made sure to drink two glasses of water at 4.30pm. It was a sunny evening and I had no plans or chores to do. There was no excuse.

BUT THEN

I had to stay half an hour later at work than I planned, which meant that I had to wait longer for a bus home, which then took longer to get home in the traffic, by which point my stomach was rumbling, and the book that I was reading was so good…. that I abandoned the run, heated up some soup and sat on the sofa for 4 hours and finished A Visit from the Goon Squad with a cat on my knee.

This meant that I had to get up at 6am this morning instead to run 5 miles to Muswell Hill and back. After such a restful evening I was able to jump out of bed and bound out of the door, thoughts of time and its vicissitudes still bouncing around my brain. I was able to, in theory, I mean to say. In practice I creaked out of bed and rasped around the streets, so brain-dead that I didn’t even see my husband run past me in the opposite direction, holding up his hand in an unrequited high five.