32 weeks, 50.4 miles and a revisit to callousness towards pain

This week’s running was very lopsided in terms of how positive minded I was during it. My 7.5 miles on Tuesday morning and Wednesday morning were both really strong. Unfortunately the sessions for the rest of the week were considerably more arduous.

I have previous around running with less than ideal layering and being caught in hail or bitterly cold gale force winds, I had taken running gloves but left my woolly hat, surprisingly I can’t remember anything as bad in recent memory to the 7.5 miles I ran on Thursday evening, about 3 miles in I rang my gloves over the top of my head and I’m pretty certain my hair had froze. My left shoulder and neck were very cold and I was grateful for a decent hill to drive my arms a bit more going up. I wasn’t surprised when arriving home that the temperature was around 0 degrees C again.

I did the same 7.5 mile route on Saturday morning which was a doddle in comparison, my woolly hat was a big help and the weather was a lot more pleasant.

After the 32.4 miles as a long training run last week, I had decided to only do 20.4 this morning. There is an element of psyching myself up for long training runs that just doesn’t seem to carry through for 15-20 milers anymore! Long time readers of this blog will remember a 20 mile effort on a sprained foot about 2 years ago, I think my confidence in terms of being able to cover that distance with large parts of it being in a “hurt locker” is unshakeable after managing that.

My legs had chafed quite badly and the combination of wearing shorts and dried blood being visible around my knees really didn’t help my comfort levels. After finishing the shower was eerily reminiscent of the drain visual from the Psycho shower scene!

I found that even though I noticed this had happened with about 9 miles to go, it didn’t impact on my confidence about finishing the miles. Afterwards I was happy that I could persevere through it. There is a good Emil Zatopek quote that illustrates what I managed today (however briefly!)

Hopefully having had to dig a little deeper this week will have been good mental preparation for the Paris race at the start of next month..