Cool Running Ramblings : 8 March
Will he won’t he?
Hello fellow foundation fans! I wasn’t able to write a blog last week because life, as it has a tendancy to do sometimes, got in the way so I have two weeks of running to catch up on. Well that’s not strictly true sadly as the knee knack is still giving me grief so training has still been somewhat limited.
After the Sussex Beacon Half my knee was still very sore the following day so it was with some trepidation that I set off for a training run on the Tuesday morning. Frustratingly I had only gone about a mile and a half before I had to turn back and walk home as the knee was simply not having it. I rested it for a few days and tried again on the Friday with much the same result. This was a nightmare! I had been diligently performing the most painful of stretches with a foam roller but to little or no avail. My muscles were definitely getting less knotty and the stretches less painful but there seemed to be very little improvement in the knee. And all this at the very point in my training that I should be starting to attain the longest distances in preparation for the big day!
As I’d learned back in September, rest is what injuries need most so I spent last Sunday moping around the house instead of clocking up the miles. If someone had have said to me back in the summer that I would have been miserable sat indoors on a damp and windy Sunday because I would rather be running I would have thought them utterly deluded, but that is the frankly bizarre situation I now find myself in.
By Tuesday morning I figured I was ready to give it a go again and thankfully managed to complete a little three mile run with only minor discomfort and not too much by way of post run soreness either. This was a huge relief and helped ease some of the frustration of the previous three weeks. Could it be that I was back in business and could finally get back on with the training program? I didn’t want to tempt fate so whilst I was busy helping other intrepid volunteers put together 1,700 goodie bags to be sold on marathon day on Wednesday night I decided that I would skip Thursday’s run and try another little three-miler on Friday.
After about two miles of that nervous run my heart sank as the familiar pain in my right knee began to rear its ugly head and I angrily wondered when the hell this stupid knee problem was going to stop and let me get on with running my race and raising money for great causes. A couple of minutes later and the answer may have arrived from the unlikeliest of sources, celebrity drug idiot/tortured genius (depending on your viewpoint) Pete Doherty. I noticed that after about 30 seconds of “Don’t look back into the sun” filling my ears that the pain was gone. I absolutely love that song and I began to wonder if I was simply thinking too hard about my gammy knee. Could it really be that all my knee needed was ignoring?
I put my “ignore the knee” theory to the test on Sunday when I managed to do a little over 13 miles, albeit with a number of “knee breaks”. I don’t mean that I actually broke my knee, I mean that I had to stop to stretch out my right quad which seemed to stop the pain in my knee, if only for a while. My knee is still quite sore as I type this with Match of the Day 2 in my ears but at the end of today’s run I felt that I could have comfortably done another few miles which has to be a positive for me to take into the coming week.
The long and short of it is that I’m planning to downgrade my training to a meagre two runs per week on Thursday and Sunday. I’m hoping that this new reduced regime will protect my knee sufficiently that I make it to the start line whilst doing enough training to ensure that I make it over the finish line come April 18th!
Has anyone else got any similar training stories to tell? Better still, has anyone got any good news about their training? Either way I’d love to hear from you so please drop me a line: simon.allchin@thebodyshop.com
Happy training!
