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| The beautiful Besselsleigh Woods near my home |
My knee is now recovered from the injury that struck me down
two weeks before London Marathon and it’s time to start cranking up those
miles.
It’s a very different experience to January when it was all rosy
and every run was a joy which brought poetry to my heart. Now everything feels
a bit sore and my legs feel a heavy and it’s a real effort to drag myself out
of bed in the morning.
I’ve had a sore hamstring for a couple of months now. It
doesn’t prevent me from running and the pain eases soon after setting off but
what it does do is puts doubt in my mind and takes the gloss off.
I saw a physio last week who said the pain in the hamstring
was referred pain from seized and inactive glutes (insert tightarse joke here).
The only treatment apparently was to treat my glute with
some of the most brutal physio I have experienced. It was 30 minutes of excruciating
pain and it is no exaggeration to say that at least once there were tears in my
eyes and three times I emitted involuntary whimpers.
The glute problem is not really a running injury, it’s
caused by sitting down too much (curse this office job). So now I’m trying to
remember to work standing up for some intervals throughout the day. It feels
good to work standing up every now and again but it’s nothing to compare to my
friend Rose George who has taken to a treadmill desk in recent weeks.
Once I get out there and get running I am enjoying it. I’m
loving the warmer weather after the beardcicles of January. The trails along
the Thames have dried up and the ‘swamps’ of the woodland firm enough to skip
across so I’m getting some scenic routes in – about 60km of them this week.
It’s harder (and not really advisable) to do explosive speed
intervals with a tight hamstring/glute so the top end training is not there at
the moment so I am not predicting a really quick time at Abingdon Marathon but
having missed out on London it will be a positive to get to the finish line.
