The Walker With Heart

No plan survives first contact with the enemy.... Goes the quote, and mine often needs a fiddle here or there because the pesky day job intervenes, or I need to be elsewhere for my charity roles, and occasionally because I was out dancing the night before... This week was one of those weeks, emails landing which required rapid responses... Trips to the Peak District to meet up with a team I work with, ok its not all bad;-) The runs are getting better, the short in week ones are now just run - very little if any walking, I said a while ago it was a confidence issue and I'm glad I'm proving myself right, and annoyed that I don't have the ability to prove it to myself without having to run and run and run... It's a legacy of all the years I was told not to, and if it takes the same number of years to get rid of I should be ok by the time I'm 65... Solid, nothing spectacular... Just what it should be:-) As I started this run I heard a "Help", not a...

I try, I do try... The sentence went - It's alright for you, you only have a minor heart condition. Now, what I objected to wasn't so much the assumption that I run = minor.  Or indeed the telepathic diagnosis. It was the presumption to rank. The medical profession tends to have three categories of congenital heart conditions: Simple Moderate Complex This helps them predict the number that need follow up operations, the rough frequency of outpatient appointments and so on.  Even the medics recognise this is rough and ready, hell the same condition can appear in more than one box... Dependent on the impact it has on the individual and their own unique variant of it (like mine does...). I have a simpler classification scheme: Have congenital heart condition Affected by congenital heart conditions At sometime will be affected I can almost feel the ire raising so let me explain. Have In my experience the impact of a condition is so variable between individual...

Be warned, as well as running an entirely natural bodily function will be mentioned... and the kindness of strangers... This was always going to be a big week mentally, the long run was the first of this set that was longer than a half marathon.  The first time work interjected and meant that I had to move a run by a day, and the first time for a while I went for a run after a night out. The first run of the week was a gentle 4 miles. Not a lot to say about it, apart from it was done. The second run of the week, was a little more exciting.  Most people who have run have a poo story.  Sometimes its huge and you run away from the pub ( Sarah's Blog - she's one of the running twitterati ) other times its the running trots.  You're not sure where its come from but you need to go.  In my case I suspect the bread I had the night before, as I occasionally get bloating from wheat.  But when I needed to go I needed to go... And this run was along ...

The second week is done, hurrah! An early morning, gentle five miles... The first of the technical runs... And a 12-mile LSR... And they all went well, ok being out of the door and running before 6:30 is never nice, and the second "fast" mile was slightly interrupted by the flight of locks, the snappy yappy dog and the need to dodge between some gates, and the LSR was very enjoyable - cold enough for frost and hints of ice on the Sustrans route I tend to use, dry and structured to make it increasingly hard work... The simplest run: Easy, just keep to the programme - 4 x 800m run, 200m walk; 2 x 900 m run, 100m walk and run the last couple of km.  Good solid running:-) Next up was a lunchtime run, sandwiched between emails to be sent and a meeting.... Being the first of the technical runs, it involved a pattern - warm up, run hard for a mile, recover, run hard for a mile, recover and cool down... Hammering along the canal is always good fun, at lunchtime ...

I've got a T-shirt to prove it... Like my T-shirts from races it's only been worn after the hard work has been done. Gollancz publishing is one of those companies I've grown up with, as my enjoyment of SF & Fantsay books has waxed and waned over the years it's been these guy's publications more often than not that have dragged me back from a self-imposed diet of popular science and random diversions into historical fiction, crime and war novels. So when I heard about Gollancz Geeks, through Mitch Benn (buy the albums, but definitely if you like SF with a gentle humorous twist buy Terra !!!!), I signed up - expecting to get spam... Not expecting the second or third time I volunteered to review a book to be sent it within a couple of days... Path of Anger - Antione Rouaud  was the book, and so I read it... and enjoyed it... a lot... My review was short, as I tried desperately not to give away any of the plot: ----------------------------------------...

I'll try to be less than utterly boring for the next 14 weeks, but a plan has been drawn up.  A plan has been printed off.  A plan has been stored on every electronic device I have. A plan to be followed as closely as possible, but with the experience of many runs to guide those weeks which don't go to plan.  I will get a niggle, I may get an injury, I will have a bad week or two... And I know I will probably get through them, with a smile and a grimace and line up in London. So what was this week... a 10km, a 5 mile technical run (more in a bit) and the first Long Slow Run (LSR). The 10km was first thing in the morning, and the 5 miler was delayed from the strict plan by 24 hours (come on, it was meant to be run on 1st Jan!!).  Which does make the days in the office long and coffee reliant.  So my plan is to shuffle the timings to give me an easier start to the day, most of the time.  The Sunday LSRs I'll aim to run out at roughly race time (aga...