July to August has been a month of ups and downs for my
running. Around mid-July I had managed to get both of my hamstrings healed and
had started to ease back into structured training. It was a humbling process,
as I had to start at paces that were slower than when I began training for
London 2019. I was grateful to be training again, though I felt sluggish and
tired from trying to play catch-up with my training for Valencia. It was just
as I was trying to get back into full swing with my training, that I caught a
horrible chest infection in the final week of July.
Usually I joke about having ‘man-flu’, as I do sometimes
think that colds affect me more than my wife, but this was more than just a bad
cold. My confidence in my fitness was to take a further knock, as I found even
going up and down the stairs tiring. For the next week or so I spent most days
drifting in and out of sleep, whilst briefly trying to watch TV to only fall
asleep again. It got to the stage where I had become so frustrated with being
stuck inside the house that I tried to force myself outside when I started to
feel better again. My thinking was that even a very slow mile walk to the park
and back would reinvigorate me. Little did I know that it would leave me in a
sweaty and weakened mess when I returned home. What made it even more worrying
was that it had been a lovely day to go for a walk, it was sunny but not too
warm; yet I felt like I just had come back from a long run being done at a
decent pace.
It would be fair to say that my confidence by this stage was
pretty much at an all-time low for 2019 so far. I questioned whether I had been
too greedy in 2019? Had I just demanded too much of myself in one year? There
were still ongoing problems with the house, and I castigated myself for
thinking that I could avoid the problems that had plagued me in 2017 -18 during
the Summer. I’d love to say that I used the techniques to keep me in a positive
mindset, that I first identified when I discovered my hamstring problems;
however that was not the case. I just felt sad about my running situation, and
no exercises in perspective were going to avoid that feeling.
Some may see that as self-pitying, and there could indeed be
an element of that thinking process in how I was feeling at the time. My view
is that in relation to my running, I had got to the stage that mentally and
physically I just needed to get rid of the chest infection; and that I would
just have to accept the thoughts as well as feelings I was going through.
Recognising it as a mild illness that needed to be passed through. Colleagues
and friends asked whether it might be time to step back from my running after
the hamstring injury and getting so ill. I understand their concern and
appreciate that from the outside it may seem like I am pushing myself too far.
In a lot of ways it is hard to argue with them as, a runner
if you want to pursue the best possible version of your running ability, you
are pretty much on the edge of peak fitness that in some (unfortunate) cases
teeters over into injury. Furthermore that quest to get to peak fitness is
littered with dangers and obstacles, such as illness in this case or a
recurring injury. My two objections to this view stems from my own personal
feelings towards running and the other of the general state of how achievement
is viewed in society.
For me pushing myself to my limits has a feeling of being alive
and in the moment. I feel it most during my speed sessions or on a long run.
The world becomes a simpler place because as the difficulty of the run
increases you are presented with a simple choice: you can give up on the run or
carry on. No other thoughts enter you mind, as your body is desperately trying
to bring to your attention how hard it is working; you are in the moment with
the neither past nor future being a concern. To many people that might seem
crazy, but to me that is a release and allows me to find a sort of peace. My
other view is that with the increasing pace of technology, and so-called
‘running-hacks’, we have come to expect instant running results with little
effort or setback. To me that is not how pursing a passion works.
You only have to look
at the sacrifices made in other pursuits, such as climbing with documentaries
like Free Solo or Dawn Wall to see this
point in action. These are projects that take an enormous toll on the people
trying to achieve those goals, which takes place over years. Witnessing the
setbacks these climbers had to experience, made me realise how it is an
inevitable part of pursuing something that is going to take you out of your
comfort zone. In short people only like to see the surface success, the triumph
in the moment or be told how this one simple trick will help them achieve their
goal in their desired area. I just don’t think that’s how things work when
going after a goal, there will be periods where things are going backwards or
not going the way you would have expected. Whilst laying there with my chest
infection I tried to make a concerted effort to look forward to how I could start
building up my running after I had recovered.
With some more rest I was given the all-clear by the doctor
that I could return to running. After discussions with my coach I was relieved
to discover that I could still aim for the Ladywell
10,000m race on 1 September, with the caveat that I would not be in peak
fitness for the race. What followed were four weeks of frantic training –
conducted with reasonable restraint- that allowed me to get back to the shape I
was in when I did my January 10k. It’s hard to put into words the relief I felt
coming back into specific running training. Of course there was a feeling of
rustiness, but there was also a sense of returning to what I had begun. I
suppose the best way to describe it is when I started to recover from my chest
infection and was walking to work on a sunny morning. There was a certain
indifference to be going to work and also a happiness to returning to full
health (in my chest as well hamstrings!).
It goes without saying that those four weeks leading up to
Ladywell have been challenging, but then that is what a marathon training plan
should be about. I face my first track 10k with a mixture of fear and
excitement. Fear in that I know that any true 10k effort will be hard, the
concentration required on the track will be a different challenge to running on
the road, I will be in a challenging seeded group and this is something that is
beyond my normal realm of running. For those very reasons that is why I am
excited; the ability to see what sort of fitness I am in, to see how I react
under pressure in a tough race and on the track for the first time.
Most of all I am glad to be able to fulfil my goal for the
last two years of being able to race a track 10k and to carry on the journey of
returning to an even better running form. For now I will leave you with a track
that sums up my approach to my track race (see what I did there?!):
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