Half Training – not really training

I managed a slow blustery ten kilometres on the road yesterday. I had to keep my eyes on the ground as the conkers (horse chestnuts) are beginning to fall and just one of those little blighters is enough to make me trip or roll my ankles in unnatural directions. My half marathon is five days away and yet another injury this close would be the last straw. 

My existing injury is apparently less of an injury and more of a chronic imbalance. I went to Nigel last Thursday. As well as a running coach, he’s also a ‘Corrective Exercise Specialist’ which probably means loads of technical stuff, but for me, it meant that I could get an outside view of why my leg is giving me jip.

Turns out there’s several reasons I’m broken. On the basic muscular side of things, I’ve got two muscles that have downed tools, and their complementary muscles over-working: one in my thigh and one in my lower leg. More alarmingly, on the neurological side, I apparently have a deficit in my ‘pontomedullary reticular formation (pmRF)’. Of course I did. 

Every day’s a school day. It seems that this thing in the brain that deals with loads of stuff to do with movement, posture and balance is a bit lacking in my brain. I have too much outward rotation in my bottom half and too much inward rotation on my upper half! It’s a wonder I can walk at all. He’s given me exercises for this as well as my sleepy muscles and told me that I should feel a lot better in four weeks if I maintain a twice-daily regimen of following them. 

I have been following the programme so far, and my leg still starts hurting from around mile three or so, but already the pain feels a little less, which could be psychosomatic of course, but encouraging. It’s too late to help with the training for my race this Sunday which is okay. Now that I’ve let go of the fact that this was my goal race, I can just go out and kind of enjoy it. If life had gone according to plan, I could have been running with my older sister who is hoping to beat her 1:59 from last year, at least for a few miles. As it is, I’ll be waving her off at the beginning, and hoping she has stashed away a warm jacket to wear while she waits for me. 

It is a bit disappointing not having things go as planned. It was a stretch to be able to get back to my sub-2-hour days (I did manage the feat once, ten years ago), especially as I’ve started to get perimenopause symptoms now. I’m not giving up on that goal, however. I think I have it in me, it’s just going to be a bit delayed. That is what I need to tell myself, as I am prone to take the path of least resistance, and if someone with expertise were to tell me that it was impossible for me to get much faster, I would probably say, ‘alright then, I’ll just chug along at an easy pace, walk up the hills, and keep them short’. 

Unfortunately, they haven’t, so I’ll keep trying. I’m already looking for possible candidates later on this year. For now I’m going to keep doing my exercises and keep getting out there in this autumn season, probably my favourite time of the year, if I can dodge the conkers.