Chinks in the armour (2)

I'm having issues with my blog or it could just be blogger losing comments etc so I'm re-posting this.

There's a nice article in Marathon and Beyond called Running as Armour which goes into what the author, a doctor, declares are some of the benefits of a running habit. I must agree with most of them but some days it feels like the habit is tearing down the body rather than keeping it invunerable to life's knocks.

For example, I woke up this morning with very tight sore achilles, calves and hamstring, in fact the entire back of one leg was like a giant cord of knots. Tight, tight, tight despite 1/2 hour of stretching last evening and a long tempo run staring me in the face today. Forecast was for wind and lots of rain and so decided to take the van to work to save energy (that turned out to be a great decision). Still tight and a bit sore all morning thinking 'Man, how can I run like this?' but miracles happen and once the shoes were laced on things started to improve.

The plan called for 12 miles with 6@1/2 marathon pace which I decided to do as an out and back run. However, dummy decided to leave his gloves and headband behind at the start with warm feel like temperatures and the wind at my back initially. Regretted this for the entire 2nd half but had other small miseries to keep me occupied, that is fighting the 30km headwind while trying to keep the effort up. Reverted to alot of counting and some yelling at the sky for some portions and only managed to do the return leg 4 minutes faster than the slow jog out. It was so nice to be finished even though the tempo pace was much slower than planned, not even marathon pace today (ouch).

An unexpected reward and another chink off the armour after the run was a stiff neck and back that just came from nowhere...'what gives, am I falling apart?' or maybe it's just a lack of ice cream! That will go good with a nice homemade peach cobbler that magically appeared after weeks of incessant whining and moaning for more dessert.

Which reminds me, the Readers Digest (hey, it's a nice light read) reports that the current New Yorker has a cartoon of 2 dogs. "I had my own blog for a while," one says to the other, "but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking."