Friday 12 June 2009

Wagon Sores - 6 Months On

Wednesday was a day of note for a couple of reasons. Firstly I ran my first track 1500m and secondly it signified 6 months since my last alcoholic drink.

While the latter seems little to celebrate the achievement has to be measured against the fact it's the first time I have gone that long since my first proper drink at 15 - which involved half a bottle of Teachers whisky and a tour-of-the-town pukefest. My reason for stopping was purely to facilitate training and because I was getting a bit fed up of 4 day hangovers. What started off as easy, just got easier until the nice weather arrived. Just lately however, there has been a bit of the green-eyed monster as I walk past beer gardens. Unfortunately I come from the Magnus Magnusson school of drinking - I've started so I'll finish -and I'd end up being wheeled out of there.

Good job I have the running to concentrate on. I ended up having 4 days off running because of my knee injury, at the end of which I had developed a nervous tick and a bad case of tourettes. It was a case of run or go insane so I did an easy 4 miler on tuesday and raced the 1500m on wednesday night. Initially I had planned to run the 400m also but felt that would be pushing my luck.

The race itself posed an interesting challenge. I have done no VO2 max or faster training yet my natural 'talents' lie towards the faster end of things. I decided to play safe and ignore the other runners and try and run an even paced 4:25 to open up the season. Unfortunately, in my ignorance this meant the humiliation of trailing at least 10 metres behind the other 12 runners for 2 laps. The good news is that I ran the last 800m in about 2:11 and worked myself up to a semi-respectable 7th place in 4:14.10. Pretty happy with that, particularly as in hindsight I could have afforded to go a fair bit quicker in the first half of the race. Now it's out of the way I can aim for more aggressive splits in the future.

Now it's a case of waiting to see what the knee decides to do next as it's behaving very strangely!

4 comments:

  1. That's a pretty encouraging time at this stage.

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  2. Thanks, it's a good base to start from!

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  3. WTH...your elbow and knee aren't connected are they?

    Knees are a pain, literally and figuratively. Thanks to an insane amount of USTA matches bunched into the smallest time possible, my intake of NSAIDs has dramatically increased. Knees and ankle. Bleh.

    Also, may resurrect my own blog soon (summer break and all), and I'd like to link your blog, if you're ok with that.

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  4. Sure, go ahead!

    Everything is connected, ergo everything hurts! Getting old sucks.

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