22 weeks, 61 miles and a reminder to not always fit the narrative to the story

This week was a good continuation from a managing to get above 60 miles last week. I had Monday and Tuesday off as the long run last Sunday had taken more out of me than I initially realised. The first session on Wednesday morning of 5.4 miles was at a good speed and I felt I had mostly recovered. This was followed by a steady 7.5 miles on Thursday and then twice more on Friday, one before and one after work.

My running this weekend was substantially harder than anything I’ve done since Paris. I did 12.9 miles on Saturday which was a steady comfortable 7.5 miles followed by a horrific 5.4 miles. For some stupid reason I had conflated it getting light with the temperature rising and was terribly wrong for leaving my hat and gloves inside after the 7.5 miles segment. For the final few miles back to my flat I couldn’t feel my fingers and the windchill was brutal. I had to use my teeth to separate the key for getting inside the building and rotate it using my phone. Once inside it took about 30 minutes to fully warm back up again and I had to bury myself in 5 layers with the heating on to achieve this!

I finished today with 2 laps of 7.5 miles and a 6.4 mile run with Paddy. These were nowhere near as challenging as the cold from yesterday and I kept the hat and gloves on throughout.

I had mainly used some of the comments from Philadelphia Eagles players and coaches from the post Superbowl interviews as motivation for this week. The game last weekend was captivating in that the Eagles never succumbed to the underdog status and despite being without one of their best players on offense and on defense for part of the season and the entirity of the playoffs, they didn’t shift from their belief that they would defeat a team that had won 5 championships this millennium.

If they would have followed the media narrative that they should have been out of the playoffs in the first round because they couldn’t replace the injured players to a level where they’d still win, the Superbowl wouldn’t have been anywhere near the spectacle it was.

I seem to go through phases in my training where it would be so easy to come up with a narrative as to why I don’t need to do as much mileage one week and invent something I need to recover from or to find an excuse to go later in the day instead of where I’ve planned to go in the morning.

It is one of the things I love about this sport is that it forces you to be honest about your training when race days roll around. I found a good quote about character and how it relates to narrative and story. Hopefully I’ll be able to resist such narratives in the build up to July and allow the story to build my character rather than the narratives.