Running again

This week I'm meant to run 43 miles. I've got a feeling that if I did that, after running less than 5 miles last week, I might really come a cropper. But then if I don't get my mileage up, fairly horrendous things will happen when I try to do Osaka in six weeks' time.

I got home tonight and checked the running schedule I've got scribbled on a bit of notepaper by the bed. All week I just have 5 miles per day. All next week. Today I'm meant to do eight miles. However, after another day at the coalface, I struggled to get out of a work frame of mind and put my running head on.

This isn't something you can force. I had to get myself psyched up, and my wife thought the way to do this was to come and tell me I should shift my lazy carcass and go out running. What I needed was to lie on my back and eat chocolate biscuits for three hours then pass out.

We compromised: after an hour I sucked down some running gloop and went out to the park. Then I put in eight miles of running round and round a 600 metre lap, which would have been hell in the mornings, but in the evenings, with cooler weather and people jogging round, rather than obstinately walking the wrong way, it's a much easier experience. Doing this many laps is encouraging, because you keep passing the same people as they walk slowly, and I averaged less than one near-collision with somebody not looking where they were going per lap.

What's also odd, and I wasn't expecting it on this distance, was that I had some epic moodswings: the first half hour was neither one way or the other, but then I found myself irrationally elated, and then, on my fastest lap, weeping as I hurtled along. Maybe my body is deciding to punish me for hurting it so. It will not defeat me.

Well, not yet.