The months of May and June have not been that great for me in terms of
running. This is partly down to struggling to recover from the London Marathon
and also more serious matters from moving to Bedford. Before I go onto explain
what has happened I thought I would start with a brief but funny conversation I
had with two schoolboys on one of my runs over the last two months. For context
I had made no effort to engage them or say hello, I just saw two silhouettes
against the sun approach me and then say:
Silohouettes: ‘Sir, do you think you are a cool?’
Me (surprised at being spoken to
randomly and the nature of the question): ‘I don’t know, what do you
think?’
Silohouettes: ‘Yeah, you are
okay. Have a good run’
Me (relief at my response having
passed the school boy test): ‘Cheers’.
It seems that children, at the very least, are a lot more open to
saying hello (and even trying to have conversation with random runners) in
Bedfordshire than they are in London. The reason for including the conversation
was that it sums up how my running has been over the last two months. Subject to random interruptions, that have been both surprising and unnerving. I have
been trying to get my running back on track, but have had some funny – and not
so funny issues- from this random thing we all experience called life.
Each little interruption on its own did not cause too much of a problem,
however, it was all of the problems below that has led to my running being
severely curtailed.
It started with me trying to recover too quickly from the London
Marathon. I seem to take a long time to recover from marathons, but this time I
did not get my usual two to three day rest as I had to be back at work the next
day. This led to a deep sense of fatigue that I felt throughout May. I think
this was for two reasons; I had enjoyed the London Marathon so much that I
don’t I realised how much effort I had expended in getting under three hours, and not being able to rest due
to there being a busy period at work.
With all this going on I tried to rush back to a specific training
program, which rather than making my running better, led to me limping off the
track at Bedford and going through a gentle rehab routine for healing a
strained hamstring.
Then on 20 May a new timetable from Bedford to London was introduced,
which led to my journey in some cases increasing by up to two hours each way. It
wasn’t as bad as the Northern service in Manchester, however after much
publicity about how good this new timetable was going to be, it was frankly a shambles.
It wasn’t so much the time it took to get home, it was the sheer
unpredictability of being able to get to work and/ or get home that made
everything so much more difficult to plan my running around. During this time I
thought I had come with a novel hashtag of #thameslate, but then saw that a lot
of Thameslink’s customers had also thought of this. I think the worst part of
the delays isn’t even that they happen- there are always going to be teething problems
when a new system is introduced- it’s that train travel costs so much in the UK
for season tickets.
Alongside all of this my wife and I discovered that the builder of our
house had decided to cover our bricks, due to incorrectly installing the
disabled access in our house. We thought the builder was a reasonable person,
but since alerting him to this problem, he has become increasingly unreasonable
and used intimidating behaviour in response to our concerns. It has made things
quite stressful, as besides litigation, there is no real way of bringing this builder
round to discussing how to fix this problem.
Of course there are rogue customers as much as there are rogue builders,
but it does make you question how someone can be okay with allowing their poor
workmanship to lead to serious damp within a new build. Towards the end of June I also managed to get
another bout of man-flu, which didn’t really help matters.
Hopefully all these issues that I have mentioned will get sorted. Of
course there will always be periods where work is busier than normal, and that
is to be expected, however I was just unlucky with when this happened straight
after London. With all the other problems I feel like my running is like an
internet connection, with various issues causing my training to grind to a slow
halt. I appreciate that this post appears to be negative, but I think it is
good to record the bad as well as the good times; because you can look back on
those times and see what you learnt from it. Also I think social media is
biased towards and has too many unrealistic images of everything being
positive, without any sort of setbacks. For
me it is about having the trust to not try and force my training back to where
it was before London. It will come, I believe and hope it is about just hanging
in there.
