The morning was overcast and once again, I felt not at all like running. This is the little routine that my conscious and unconscious go through from time to time… the unconscious, like a child, testing the boundaries to see how flexible they are.
It doesn’t always go down this way, but on this occasion I consciously made a black espresso, ate a banana and got out there.
There had been much rain the night before last and I half expected a mud-bath, but I was pleasantly surprised at how firm the going was. This said, there were patches of mud to slide about on, or plough through, all over the place.
I should point out that, like the Inuit with snow and ice, I have become accustomed to many different types of mud. The mud today was not ‘skating’, which is when there’s a really thin, super slippery layer of liquid mud on a firm base, but rather ‘graceful’, where the mud is a little thicker and gives you a better chance to stay upright.
Which I needed at one point when my left foot slid to the right, in front of my right leg coming through. Because the slide was graceful, I had time to arch like a cat, extricate my right leg and apply traction to push me in the direction I was falling. I felt the distinctive pang of overstretched back muscles and observed my first two fingers on my left hand sink half an inch into the mud, before the momentum kicked in and I righted myself. Fun, especially in slow-motion like that!
It was only a quick run around the (increasingly) normal 5.2 mile circuit (Royal Oak, West Wood, Magical Path) and this morning it took me 44 minutes. And despite the unconscious protestations, the running itself was pretty easy.