7/1/20 – Going South

Happy New Year, all.

The Christmas and New Year period has been a strange one on the running front for us both. To be honest, it’s not been the start of the London Marathon experience that we were hoping for due to a number of reasons.

Sue has been laid low with another cold and chest infection, that has interfered with her running and simply won’t shift. My woes have come in the form of injury, and to add insult, it appears I got it from sitting on my arse rather than exercise!

As you may have read, the last few weekends in the run up to Christmas, I was on tour with Jim Bob. As tour driver, this has meant around 3-4 hours a day behind the wheel. This led to a stiff glute, after each drive and daily run. It got steady worse until in early December at the Hull gig, I felt the muscle ping whilst running up a flight of stairs.

As long-time readers will know, my approach to dealing injury is generally ignore it until the pain goes away. At a push, I might even invoke Voltarol gel and an occasional foam rolling. After the initial ping, it seemed to settle down after a couple of non-driving days and the afore-mentioned patented treatment plan. Another twinge on the stairs a few days later, let me know all was not well.

It wasn’t until parkrun on Christmas Day that I began to realise that injury wasn’t going to go away of its own accord. It’s not like I didn’t have fair warning either. The previous Saturday in Bournemouth, I noted that my glute was mainly giving me gyp on the short sections of incline. It was a real stroke of genius, therefore, to attempt Hilly Fields parkrun four days later on Christmas Day. Hey Doofus, the clue is in the name.

I could bore you with the reasons why we simply had to do Hilly Fields on that day, but they won’t make much sense, rooted as they are, in our geeky parkrun obsessions. Anyway, after six considerably steep inclines, I was done for. We both had it in mind to kickstart our Marathon training with the Staplehurst 10 miler on the coming Sunday, but Sue was sneezing for England and now I could barely walk.

Of course, none of this stopped the parkrunning, including the New Years Day double at Peckham Rye and Bexley. The latter was my worst parkrun time ever as I trundled round with Sue, who was finding it increasingly difficult to breathe in the chill air. Our obsession had truly obliterated all sense, something needed to change.

My glute pain had gone from being confined to running, to being an ever-present nag, like toothache. I was long overdue for getting some proper treatment advice from a physio. My greatest fear was they would simply tell me this injury would require rest. No Daily Running and No parkrun. – I wasn’t sure my sanity would survive receiving this news.

Enter the excellent Lucy at Octopus Clinic in Holborn, who is the physio for Team ARUK, to confound my expectations. She was very kindly able to fit me in at very short notice and performed a very thorough diagnosis of my problem. This turned out to be twofold, glute and hamstring and yes, most likely it was the long driving stints that were the most likely cause of the damage.

A treatment plan was formulated with a regimen of daily specific exercise and, best news of all, I can still run up to 5k on flat, smooth surfaces: just as long as I run for two minutes and then walk for one.  Sanity, daily mile and parkrun all live to fight another day – Hurrah! On the walk back south across Waterloo Bridge, I paused to snap the striking picture above of the City skyline, incorporating the riverside Marathon route. It served as a useful reminder that this challenge is not one to be taken lightly and to listen to one’s body.    

Injuries and illness aside, there is another good reason why things are heading south at the moment. We are off to Australia for a month to celebrate Sue’s significant birthday. Indeed, writing this blog entry at 33,000 ft somewhere over the Arafura Sea, ironically whilst sitting on my arse again for 24 hours!

Given the truly terrible bushfires in Australia, coupled with the resulting poor air quality and summer heat, running down under will end up presenting its own challenges. We have ideas to progress our Marathon fitness whilst there, but we also know that we’ll have to play things by ear and display a lot more common sense than we did over Christmas. Finally, a massive thank you to everyone who has generously sponsored us following our Fundraising launch, a fortnight ago. We were both very conscious that the run up to Christmas is a pretty silly time to starting asking for Sponsorship, so we were truly overwhelmed by the response.

If you would like to sponsor either or both of us the links are:
Neil – Alzheimer’s Research UK
Sue – Bowel Cancer UK