28/12/15 – Slight Return

As Boxing Day fell on a Saturday, within 24 hours I was back at Lloyd for the normal parkrun, a rare opportunity indeed. This time, however minus Sue. A chesty cough, rather than Christmas Day over-indulgence has put paid to her own parkrun double.

It wasn’t only Sue who was fairing badly that morning, after a another bout of heavy rain and no time to recover from yesterday’s pounding, Lloyd was a complete quagmire. The worst I’ve seen it. It seems that pretty much everyone in the much smaller field was suffering similarly, so despite my highest positional finish for a long while, the time was my worst-ever at parkrun at 35:35.

I didn’t feel too bad about it, though having reading in one of my Christmas pressies about how muddy cross-country running is excellent for building leg-strength and stamina. My recovery time felt good too and no pain either whilst running or afterwards.

Speaking of Christmas presents, I got a Fitbit, or ‘Fat Bitch’, as it became known in our house when Sue got hers a while back (branding is everything). It certainly startled the in-laws over the christmas dinner table when I was talking about my ‘fat bitch’. I was quite pleased with my total of over 15,000 for Boxing Day, especially when it was put into sharp perspective the following day.

Sunday was one of those Christmas holiday days when we did absolutely nothing except sit on the sofa scoffing ourselves silly. The steps total was 1,005 for the whole day. Given that getting up, dressed and downstairs uses around 300, this was one lazy day, especially as I was half-planning my usual Sunday 10k.

The next morning I felt terrible, but even though it was a Palace home game and time would be more limited, I decided that I would get out for an easy run reasonably early and see how far I felt like doing.

The answer was 10k over the usual route, although no-one was more surprised than me after the first couple of k’s when the previous day’s over-indulgence threatened to make an abrupt reappearance. Eventually I settled down into a slow, but comfortable pace and, at the points when I could have turned for home, it just didn’t occur to me to do so. The weather was just gorgeous, mild, bright not real breeze to speak of, no pain either. It occurred to me, whilst running, that Marathon training really wasn’t going to get any better than this, but sadly time constraints prevented me from extending the run further than 10k. The second half of the run was much better time-wise too, ending up with 1:08:33, when for a long time it looked like I’d struggle to get in under 1:10.

Sue also decided to see how her breathing was doing. Not well as it turned out, but she managed a respectable stop-start 8k herself similarly buoyed by the weather.

With another parkrun double opportunity coming up at the weekend and Marathon training starting in earnest, I declared that to be my final run of 2015 and what a happy, easy one it was.

Happy New Year all.