I went out this morning at just before 9am, six days after doing my last long run, with the aim of adding just a couple of miles. How hard could it possibly be?
Well, as it turned out, really hard as I had to do my first 15 all over again before adding those two babies. Plus, for the whole of this week my left leg has been seriously out of sorts in that my calf was still tight and felt like it was being dragged along at the beginning of all my runs. Then on Thursday, I woke up with peculiar sensations running down from my hip when I twisted it in certain ways. It wasn’t to do with the muscles, as it felt like thin lines of discomfort, shooting down from various places in my top leg. Plus, it never happened on the second time I made the same movement.
I know jack about how the body works so I’m never quite sure whether I should ignore these oddities and plough on or rush myself down to A&E. I’ve settled on the basic rule that if the pain doesn’t start to ease off after the first couple of miles then it’s serious. But to be on the safe side with this little funny I decided to do absolutely nothing on both Thursday and Friday apart from a little stretching and self massaging. This coincided wonderfully with my first ‘night out’ on Thursday with some folk from work. I managed a whole 3 beers and a whiskey sour along with my mega burger at Almost Famous, and although I was tucked up in bed by 9pm it felt good to dip my toe into normal life.
So it took me 3 hours, including a quick pit stop at Costa for a call of nature, to do my 17. It is much much slower than my once upon a time dream of a 10 minute mile pace but as I nearly called it a day at mile 12 when my legs felt like concrete, it is a bonus to be able to say I’ve now done that distance.
On another wonderful plus note, I uploaded my donate page for the charity that I’m running for on Monday and in my first week I’ve got nearly £500 which is superb and absolutely definitely a spur for me to keep pounding away!
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