TARMAC - A NECESSARY EVIL
Post-Tour of Pendle, if thinking I could recover to a fit enough state and find some fast enough legs to plunge in to the Podium 5K two weeks later was over-ambitious, then thinking I could return to Pendle for the morning circuit run just a few days on was utter stoic stupidity. The reality was that it took a week to even descend a staircase in some sort of orderly fashion, so a premature venture back up the fell three days after the race was a knee-knocking plunder that served only to remind me of how bad it felt in those last few miles again.
Subsequent runs have ironically felt much better on a road surface with a reduction of lateral knee movement on the smooth and hard stuff proving not to be as irritating. This tarmac hater has had to dance with the devil in order to keep some training up.
After a frustrating week of lumbersome road and parkland plodding, last Monday I felt compelled to just go out and do a hard effort road run in some sort of shit or bust time trial. The Clitheroe four miler route from work is my modern day gauge for such experiments and it did get a bit ugly from around two miles. The effects of a lack of quality running at some sort of speed kicked in. The knees weren't overly impressed either, but I persevered and in the end was not much more than half a minute outside the best time I've done on that route. The result was neither shit, or bust. It was in fact just the tonic to get back in to some sort of proper training mentality for the rest of that week, and to date. The four miler blast certainly proved that sessions needed to make a hasty return as a weekly must-do, so with my next longer term goal geared towards making amends for that shocker of a run at the Lancashire Cross Country Championships at the beginning of the year, I've had a couple of really good sessions in the parkland slop that have restored a bit of belief and helped fire up some focus again.
The situation with the knees remains a concern though. Stretching, manipulating and staying off the fells seems to have stabilised the problem for now. If it doesn't fade away in the foreseeable future, then I have to unwillingly accept the prospect of taking some time out. After all, what's really at stake here? These are my knees, I only get one real pair. Should I be privileged enough to grow much older, the foolish pride that drives me to try and race to some sort of standard today ought not to cost me the ability to do other active stuff tomorrow.