Over the last 14 months of absence from this particular writing chair, I have been only participating in ‘occasional running’.
More specifically this has been the circa-quarterly runs with Daren… 4.6 miles at the beginning of Apr18, 6.5 miles at the end of Apr18, 6.5 miles in Sep18 and most recently, 6.5 miles in Jan19.
This last circuit, a few weeks ago, was the first time that I had not managed to run up the Tank Tracks to the top of Home Hill. This was momentous for all the wrong reasons, though we had often discussed that this day would come (though maybe in our sixties or seventies). When it did, Daren kindly walked up the hill with me… though I’m pretty sure that he could have run it, given that he completed an ultra marathon a week later.
It might seem odd that, in my mid-fifties, I should think that I am still able to run up & down the Downs (more than 1,000 ft in height gain) on the spur of the moment and with no training! No wonder that over the last couple of years I have gone from having stiff legs on the second day after a run, to hilariously walking around like I’m on stilts for three or four days from the first morning after.
Irrespective, we agreed that by Apr19 we should have worked on our fitness levels (the royal we = me particularly) so that we can resume running up this hill.
Clearly, April was a long way off and I had yet to start even thinking about ’training’ when two things happened this last week.
First, Daren asked if I wanted to run again , with 2.5 days notice. Second, Mini-me Mark completed his 174th marathon by running on a treadmill for a few hours.
It took me half a day to think clearly about training ahead of our impending run. But then I designed a simple high intensity training (HIT, ignoring the simple for obvious reasons) programme, each one consisting of a warm-up and three cycles of exertion & recovery… with each segment lasting ten breaths through my nose.
OMG! This circa-5 minutes of exercise left me gasping for air!
I managed to persuade myself to inflict this horrible medicine on myself a further three times in the two days before our run and the initial gasping receded to merely being exhausted. I’m not sure that it did a lot for me, except maybe to tighten my calves to at least give me a mild foretaste of how I feel as I sit here now on the day after the run.
Meanwhile, Mark’s treadmill marathon reminded me that in 2010 I completed a 20-mile training run on our treadmill. I went back to the post in this blog and realised that my writing was actually worth reading (I should highlight that I have a conflict of interest in making this statement 🙂 ) which made me think that I should start trying to contribute to the blog again. Especially given that the original aim involved a cyclical motivation: run to write, write to run.
Yesterday dawned frosty with a sultry sun behind a thick mist, all of which made for beautiful scenery when viewed from above.
We enjoyed our normal ‘deep in conversation’ run down to Pyecombe, up to the top of Wolstenbury, down to Clayton and along (gently up really) to the bottom of the Tank Tracks. Here we walked the hill again, a full three minutes faster than three weeks ago (yippee), but with a greater degree of felt-pain at the top (ugh). Then we ran back to Jack & Jill, down the hill.
It was a truly joyous run on a beautiful day and it reminded me that, though unfit based on previous levels of fitness, I’m still in pretty good shape for a middle-aged bloke.
This said, I am now motivated to work on my fitness level and in April I hope to be able to write yet another post, this time attesting to the fact that we are once again ‘running the hill’.
In the meantime, happy running 🙂
