Battling Back... and being stupid

There's many ways to start a training campaign... There's plenty of advice on how to start... There's the apps that will take you from couch to 5k.

Or you can end up not running for the best part of two months, and not running consistently for six and decide to kick things off with a trail half marathon.

THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDED COURSE OF ACTION!!!!

There are is a mild arrogance amongst a few of my friends, and indeed myself, who know deep down that on the day, with a medal at end, that we can strap on the shoes and churn it out.  We've lost count of the runs we've done of the years.  Our medal collection has reached the point where we only keep the ones that mean something; the ultras, the marathons, the firsts and ones that just caught on our souls.

These runs with nothing behind them aren't, normally, the miracle runs you read about in the magazines - the ones where someone whose never run before runs an 80 minute half marathon.  These are long, slow and gentle.  The sort of runs that you run because... just because... and although the smile may slip into a grimace more often that it should you are smiling.  Your body doesn't respond quite as it does when trained properly, your legs don't rotate as quickly as they should.  But the body does respond and the legs do rotate... and you do smile.

13.1 is a long way, and as a shock to the system its worked.  The shock is threefold; I'm a lot slower than I can be, I can still bang out a half marathon and most importantly it didn't hurt... well didn't hurt too much.

The timeline is well known to me now - the initial shock passes, the runs become more frequent, I start getting bored with the walk breaks and will start running through.  The legs will start to rotate faster and slowly, oh so slowly I will move from being a plodder to a runner... and I will transition to a training plan, and the strength will start coming back and at the end of May I'll add another one of those marathon medals to the collection.

That's the plan, and if I can plod 13.1 along the Wirral Way then there's no reason why it won't happen.  Injuries will happen, illness will happen and no plan survives first contact with real life.  But I'm coming back...

And to re-empahise DO NOT KICK THINGS OFF WITH A HALF MARATHON THIS WAS A STUPID THING TO DO.

TTFN

Paul

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