Over the past few months, I have had to cope with something that I never thought would happen to me and that is, I struggled to keep motivated to go running.
What happed first was that I spent the first week in the new year isolating with COVID which felt like a nasty cold. Then, after that I managed to hurt my back while gardening. What didn’t help is the subsequent succession of storms which would rage locally with 60MPH winds, making it very easy to convince myself that I wouldn’t even go running if I wanted to. So, when I did go running, I didn’t run very far each time because I felt my fitness had left me and it was really hard. The bottom line is that I was in need of a plan.
When I trained for my first Marathon, I considerably increased the distance I was running and noticed that as well as building my stamina, my times on short distances improved as well. Hence my golden rule has always been that the more miles I run, the faster I become. When I am on good running form, my total mileage is usually over 140 per month but my mileage in January of this year was around 50 and in February it was 80.
So I’ve set a plan to get my mileage up again, making sure I run 5 days a week and include a long run as well as forcing myself back to club training. Even after a few weeks of doing this I have noticed that I’m getting better now and managed to run the Wakefield 10K on Sunday in a time of 53:31 which relieved me because I was worried that I might not even get under 55 minutes.
So onwards and upwards. As the weather gets better, I am sure I will soon be back running the kind of distances I am used to and be able to more fully experience the joy of running.
“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.” Proverbs 15:22
Marathon Mann 