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The return of shin splints

I managed to get myself in a right  old tizz this morning.

Late last night, I started testing migrating the blog from being hosted by wordpress.com to wordpress.org. While most people will now be going ‘huh?’ it’s quite a big change.

WordPress.com allows you to host blogs on their servers but in exchange for the free hosting, you are quite restricted as what you can do with the design. With wordpress.org, you have to pay to have the site hosted somewhere else but then you can fiddle about all you like.

I’d just got the new site ready by last night and decided to do the swap this morning when I got up…. but then I couldn’t get it to work and spent an hour trying to put it right before deciding to give up, re-direct everything to the old site and try again.

The problem with all this was that it ate away at half the morning meaning I went out running later than I expected but with still enough time to get back, get ready and head into town for a shift at The Express.

What I hadn’t taken into account was that Laura had arranged for a central heating engineer to come at 8am this morning and so I had to get around, do the run and get back before he turned up or there was no chance of a shower. Running this evening was also out of the question as I’m reviewing a hotel in central London and it was impractical to bring kit into town so late.

I had about 15 minutes to get out and do the run, obviously an impossible time limit to do three miles but I still set off as quick as my aching legs from Sunday would take me (that’s not very fast by the way).

The result was me getting back with really aching shins … but at least I just managed to get a hot shower.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 3
Target: 1038
Miles to date: 1,454.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Aching from the long run

Day 345, just the 20 to go and I’ve reached 1,450 miles, though this morning’s three miler was one of the toughest… aching from upping the mileage yesterday, I took it veeeeeeeery slowly.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 3
Target: 1035
Miles to date: 1,451.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Sixteen miles and the Garmin starts to go

Back to a long run in the run up to the Athens Marathon today and, given I’ve got to do a load of studying for my course, I can’t really stay around too long to talk about it.

To avoid last week’s long-run malaise where I ran out of gas, I made sure I had a couple of bananas and spent an hour sipping on a Maxifuel sports drink before going out. I also loaded up a 2litre skin with a mix of water and Lucazade sport and loaded it into a back pack.

I headed off from the house towards Wandsworth and then cut west to Wimbledon, going around the outside of the Common before coming back to Streatham via Morden.

And it was all fine, no problems like last week at all and, aside from the glutes and hams being a little tight towards the end of the run, it all went fine.

While it was nice for me to run injury free, the Garmin is obviously on its last legs. The LCD screen is starting to drop out on the bottom right to the point I cannot clearly see some tenth-of-a-mile figures. .6 .7 .8 and .9 all look almost exactly alike meaning I have to do some guesswork to find out where I am. Just three more weeks is all I need to squeeze out of it…

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 16
Target: 1032
Miles to date: 1,448.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Christ, I’m hurting…

Five days of being tested, prodded, poked, stretched and loaded with weights on the PT course on top of the general travails of running every day for a year and I felt wrecked when I got up this morning.

What to do? Crank the miles back up to five for today before hitting tomorrow’s big run as part of my marathon program for Athens. We’re endurance runners for cripe’s sake, what else did you expect

Despite the niggles and sore bits, as per usual it was fine when I got outside and started running… but then again, it always is!

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 5
Target: 1029
Miles to date: 1,432.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Changing the breathing technique

Today’s the last day of my advanced gym programming course that contributes to my personal training diploma, leaving me a couple of weeks to embed all the information – and there’s a lot of it – until my assessment.

While I think I get most of it, it’s only when you actually start revising the information you’ve accumulated that you get just how much you get.

One of the things Abbey, our tutor has been drumming into is earlier this week is the need to get clients – and ourselves to breathe properly. Stop reading now, stand up and take ten deepish breaths and watch how you breathe.

Some lungs

What was your body doing as you were breathing? Most people will be raising their rib cages massively on the intake and pushing their tummies out on the breath out… if you did the same, you’re not breathing efficiently.

What you should be doing is breathing with your diaphragm. It’s the big muscle that flattens to let air into your lungs when you take a breath and when you breathe in, your tummy should raise, when you breathe out, you should pull your tummy in to expel all the air from your lungs.

Now try breathing again to see if you get it right. For something to become a habit for the body, it can take thousands of repetitions and so you may have to practise this thousands of times to get it right in future. Try doing it for ten to 15 minutes each night when you first get into bed.

From an exercise perspective, breathing properly should make one’s body more efficient and hence help improve performance, so this week I have been trying to breathe properly on my runs.

The trouble of course is that my body had begun to adapt to my previous breathing style and I’d become a fairly decent runner by using it. Now to re-adapt, I have to take a step backwards and slow down when running to get it right. Theoretically, when I start to get it right and crank speed back up, I will use my oxygen supply more efficiently.

It’s the kind of example that illustrates the need for a personalised training program on occasion when people want to step up.

Another example would be the lad from the course I am using for my practical assessment. While he spends six days a week in the gym and is pretty big and chiseled, his flexibility is poor and the range of movement he uses is restricted.

When weight training with heavier weights, as he’s not going through the full range of motion for an exercise, he is not working efficiently. I want to take him a step back to some lighter weights to help strengthen the tendons and ligaments that attach muscle and then work on his flexibility, so when he moves back up, he will be able to go for heavier weights and get more from his next program.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 3
Target: 1026
Miles to date: 1,427.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Thank God bad days only last 24 hours

I felt pretty dreadful for most of the day yesterday – in fact, that’s rubbish, I felt awful all day…

After heading into town for my PT course, it dawned on me that I’d had a pretty heated conversation with some travel industry colleagues at the leaving do and so sent them an apologetic text.

On the course, I was found out pretty much straight away and, to compound things, I couldn’t get my head around the three bodily planes of movement and spent most of the afternoon in the classes beating myself up about it all.

Nonetheless, I came home when we finished, had an hour’s sleep and then spent the best part of the evening working out which exercises move in which plane. I won’t bore you with the theory, but if you are interested in it, you can find out more here under the planes and axes section.

This morning, like all week, I was back on a simple three miler – there are too many aches and pains from Sunday and Monday’s runs to contemplate more, my body is screaming ‘rest’ and I’m trying not to ignore it for once, the last thing I need is an injury with just a couple more weeks to go.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 3
Target: 1023
Miles to date: 1,424.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

The hangover runs are the worst

I was very silly last night. It was Stephanie Boyle, PR manager at Visit Britain’s leaving do and I’d said I’d pop in for a couple after my course as I had to be up early to go again.

Best laid plans and all that… I ended up leaving at 11pm, a mixture of red wine and strong lager coursing through my veins. 5am, this morning and it was me cursing… my stupidity.

My head ached, I felt sick, had to go for a run and be in some kind of shape to not look stupid on the course. I ended up stumbling around Streatham like an idiot and turning up at the course feeling even worse.

One of the things we have been learning are nutrition guidelines: one of the main ones is no CRAP (caffeine, refined, alcohol and additives, processed). Of course, for me it all went out of the window.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 3
Target: 1020
Miles to date: 1,421.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Sore points – lots of them

Yesterday’s stop-start running shenanigans where I started three separate runs in a short space of time have left me feeling pretty sore. There’s a whole lot of chafing going on, while by warming up and cooling down, I’ve also a bit of a sniffle…

When the cat alarm (thanks Mini) went off this morning at 3.30am, I wanted to just curl up and die. Luckily, I was so whacked, I managed to pull her under the covers and get her and me back to sleep.

Six am and I was up, feeling like the body weighed about 20 stone rather than 13. A five miler seemed impossible today so I Vaselined up on all the sore bits and headed out to do three at as slow a pace as I could.

At 42, I am also now discovering the joys of Sudocrem – an antiseptic ointment that helps relieve discomfort from things like nappy rash!

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 3
Target: 1017
Miles to date: 1,418.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here

Today should have gone smoothly…

… but it didn’t

Today was meant to be a nice easy run – just a three miler after yesterday’s 14 miler and associated fuel tank problem.

The idea, as I was on the PT course in Southwark was to knock off there at 5pm and head to Hyde Park for a 6pm meet and run with Andy who is taking over the challenge and Damo, his pal, who will be joining him on some of the runs and trying to do 1095miles in the year but as a cummulative total rather than an every day challenge.

All well and good until about 4.45 – we’d even been doing some stretching techniques on the course and I was more than happy to let most of the group get in some pracitice on my hamstrings.

Then, just before we left, I noticed the Garmin was at about 5 per cent charge…. I was about to go on a run with nothing in place to record the fact I’d done it.

iphone in hand, I Google mapped the nearest running shop, London City Runner on Ludgate Circus, over the Bridge from where I was. I decided to run over, switch the watch on to get some mileage under the belt and pray they had a Garmin charger in stock.

A mile – or eight minutes later and I was in the shop. Great, a charger was found and I stumped up an extra £16 – only to discover it was a USB charger with no plug.

“Please tell me you have the adaptor,” I begged. The Aussie girl behind the counter started to root around… “I’m not sure we do she replied,” before finally locating one. Another tenner thank you very much.

Then I was off to the local Starbucks for a cuppa and some charge. At 30 per cent, I thought I was good to go and went for a pre-run number 2… only to find half way through there were only two sheets of loo roll in the john that necessitated me using them before heading out for some more tissues and back in.

Great – 30 minutes to get across London to meet the boys – jump on a bus I thought, failing to take into account rush hour traffic.

Ten minutes later and we had crawled a few hundred yards and so it was out of the bus and on another run… I was doing all this by the way with my backpack with normal clothes and school books in. It weighed a ton and running with it through rush hour commuters was no fun.

By the time I got to Hyde Park, I already had 2.5miles on the clock.

Thankfully, meeting the boys was a great idea – despite the fact I still had to run three miles with them. They’ve both got some great ideas for where we can take the site when Andy takes over in September…

More to be revealed in the coming days and weeks.

Click here for a link to Garmin Connect for a map and details of the run

Miles today: 6.18
Target: 1014
Miles to date: 1,415.68

Please donate to my chosen charities by clicking here