10/11/15 – Deutschland uber Alles

What better way to train for a Marathon than to bugger off to Germany for the weekend after not managing to get out running at all in the preceding week? Follow that with a 12 hour round trip to Liverpool on the Sunday (hey, we won!) and my training schedule was complete!

Aah, Germany: The Bier, the Fussball, the Wurst, the Marzipan. All four were consumed in large quantities during the three day trip. Everytime I go there, I throw in some running kit. In dozen or so German trips since I started running, I’ve run precisely once! Despite all that pre-trip reasoning, that an early morning run would help the inevitable hangovers.

This time, I admitted defeat, the kit stayed at home. Just as well really, because Friday’s ‘Katzenjammer*’ was strong enough to kill one stone dead. At least my mate Rob was in similarly poor fettle. Nothing worse than a roomy, who bounds around fresh as a ‘Gänseblümchen**’ in the morning.

Anyway it’s Tuesday and time to get back into a routine, starting with a gentle jog to swimming baths a mile away, to meet Jim for our twice-weekly 40 lengths of the pool and post-swim chinwag over a cuppa, then an flattish 5K route utilising South Norwood Country park (easy pace) to return home, carrying a pack containing swim kit. Not heavy, but it does seem to make a difference to my time which ends up as 34:06. On the plus side, all those ‘panicky’ aches and pains appear to have abated, which I’m putting down to the magic of Germany naturally.

Maybe time to pace it up a bit next time out.

* German for ‘wailing cat’ and, err, ‘hangover”!
** German for ‘daisy’ or literally ‘Small Geeseflower (the flower being small, not the Geese)’…
(Translations via Google, so should be taken with a pinch of ‘Salz’.)