From the range of garden activities yesterday, I cannot single any one out that made me feel tired, but the cumulative effect was clearly sufficient to knock me out for most of the evening and the rest of the night until 9.30am this morning. And even then I was half asleep.
It’s way too easy to find excuses not to run, so despite not feeling in the mood I climbed aboard the machine with the intention of running 5 miles of lightweight intervals.
For two miles I swapped between sic and seven miles per hour, then the next two between seven and eight. By this point I was already making bargains with my subconscious mind, battling the perceived tiredness rather than any real fatigue. In the final mile I started on eight, then increased to 9mph before dropping back to seven and eventually six.
It seemed too little to do if I’m trying to regain sufficient fitness to be able to run with Mark, let alone participate in Cliff’s crazy caper… a run between the Eyes of London & Brighton, albeit taking the Girl’s option and running as part of a relay team.
Which reminds me that the Men’s Sussex Fitness League tables are currently in disarray. Firstly, I don’t think that I’m even clinging to last place. Secondly, a real Girl seems to be heading the table on account of her 3 hour 34 minute Brighton Marathon time… none other than Maria Lees.
Various excuses surely abound as to why the men weren’t in the running. Cliff and Andy were paddling round in a kayak, Mark probably had some lame excuse for not getting a PB (but not quite as lame as my own one of not running it at all) whilst pretty much everyone had run the Paris Ecotrail 100km race a few weekends before.
Nevertheless Maria is surely heading the league!
All of which managed to persuade me to run a little further today before I switched the machine off. I realised that to this point I had run an average of 7mph, so I ran on at this speed, persuading my subconscious that I would stop at 6 miles, although both of us knew that by then I would want to run the other mile to make it an hour.
The other weekend when I was egging myself on was much more of a struggle… counting down the laboured breaths to the next slower speed and to the end. Today was more about just wanting to finish, but then again it wasn’t such an onerous session.
7.01 miles in 1 hour and I’m already planning what I’m going to do next in the garden!