Category: Bad Days

I’m not categorising this post as “Injury Time”. I’m not injured. I repeat. I am not injured.

I have a thing. A hamstring thing. It’s not painful, it’s not pulled, it’s… I don’t know. It’s basically tense. Like I’m tensing it all the time. And I suppose I am, but I’m trying not to. Though the more I think about it the tenser it gets.

Argh.

I asked the physio about it on Friday. “Should I get one of those foam roller things everyone has?”, I asked. “No”, he said, “they’re no good for hamstrings”.

So, there’s nothing I can do. I’m stretching it but, short of  crouching at my desk or touching my toes mid-meeting, I can’t stretch it all the time.

I’m giving it a whole 36 hours between runs, to see if that helps. 6 miles yesterday morning were uncomfortable, verging on unpleasant. Intervals tonight, and hard ones at that (6 x 800m). Oo, I think these might qualify as Yasso 800s.

Hamstring heaven or hamstring hell? We shall see.

Last night I ran for 1 hour and 2 minutes, with one line – no, one word – from “Joe le Taxi“, bouncing repeatedly through my head. That word, and I can hardly bring myself to write it for fear of what it might set off, was “embouteillage”.

This is the peril of running without a soundtrack – you have no control over what might run through your mind instead. Last night, in the middle of Hampstead, I remembered that I actually planned a list of things to think about before my last marathon, to combat this. It didn’t work.

The one good thing about the repeating “em-bout-eill-age” is that it reminded me of the David Sedaris story about having moved to France without being able to speak French. “Bottleneck” was the one word he knew  and he just repeated it in reply to any question. Bottleneck bottleneck bottleneck.

If anyone had actually asked me a question during last night’s run, I may have done the same.

Another day, another 5:55 alarm call.

If I get up at 5:55, by 6:10 I can be running, dressed, teeth brushed, cats fed. It is such a pain to have to feed them before being able to get outside – the stinky food, the loud miaowing, the time spent making sure Ted doesn’t steal Bill’s food.

Today, on my way back home after a terrible hill session in the rain, I was struggling up Crouch Hill feeling sorry for myself when I passed a dead cat on the pavement. He was beautiful. A tabby, quite small, laid out as if sleeping by the fire on a particularly cold day. There was a smudge of blood on his nose and his eyes were closed to the rain. A lump rose in my throat.

I fought back the tears for the remainder of my run. How pathetic, I thought, whilst unable to stop. A 36-year old woman blubbering over a cat she never knew. I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor driver who had hit the cat, the person who had moved it to the pavement, the owner missing him at breakfast time…

I was all set to write about the joy of returning to hill “sprints” after a couple of weeks’ absence, but it now seems unimportant. Back at the flat, both cats ignored my return. They had been fed, what did they care for this sweaty human invading their personal space? I choked back a feeble sob of gratitude.

Life is a hectic beast at the moment.

I’m busy at work, busy looking after cats with tubes sticking out of their faces (ick), busy eating, busy trying to get enough sleep. What did I miss? Oh yes, training for a marathon.

A run usually gives me headspace, time to think, a break from stress. When I’m pressed for time, it becomes a funnel for all the guilt I’m feeling about everything other than running. During last night’s 6 mile stagger I spent 5 worrying about work and the cat and how I was going to fit in the weekend’s running and the other 1 blowing my nose.

These are not vintage training runs. They are tough and slow and cold.  I’m churning out the miles in a low gear and I can’t seem to change it. However, as I said to Mr Notajogger last night, if I judge my performance based on effort rather than speed, I am giving it pretty much everything I can. It’s just that everything isn’t very much.

I am short-sighted. I wear glasses all day, every day.

I squint with envy on those who can wear contact lenses. I do have some but unfortunately my eyes are too dry for me to wear them for long. I save the lenses for special occasions: a long weekend run, a race, an event where people are likely to take photos and put them on facebook without my knowledge.  For everyday running I am ashamed to admit that I wear an old pair of glasses, the right lens of which has a big scratch, and which I keep in place using a red rubber band. Like the ones that postmen use to bind letters (because it is one).

In my defence, the band is usually kept hidden a cap, or at least by my hair. No doubt there are proper running glasses and/or bands to keep them in place that I could buy, but I am too tight-fisted and more importantly too lazy to do this when I already have something that works perfectly well.

Well, perhaps not perfectly. Last night my home-made running glasses let me down. Literally. It was cold and I was running a 7 mile “steady run with a few fast surges”. The glasses were fixed tightly in place. Leaving the office, it was easy to pick up the pace just in order to warm up in the freezing air. Twenty minutes’ in, I was averaging 7:20 miles and feeling good. The trouble started at Old Street tube station, where wandering pedestrians forced me onto the road a couple of times, then brought me to a dead stop. Waiting for an opening to push past them, my steaming breath fogged up my glasses. This happens quite a bit, but usually clears once I’m running again and the wind hits my face.

Heading up City Road, it seemed very dark. I was struggling to make out the edges of paving slabs. I’m not sure what happened next, but one minute I was bounding past a bus queue and the next I was lying face-down on the pavement, legs akimbo. It was more embarrassing than painful, though my right knee and elbow were bleeding. I levered myself up, limped for a few yards, then jogged carefully home.

On entering the flat, I took off my glasses. They looked strange. I have quite long eyelashes, and their mascara-ed lengths had obviously been brushing up and down against the lenses, combining with the foggy air to create black inky patches in front of my eyes.

Perhaps it’s time to invest in those proper running specs?