A month out

It's taken me a damn sight longer to get fit again than I was hoping. I chose to play in Winter League event on the second Sunday of January, which was (in some sense at least) a mistake. My knee started to hurt a lot in the third game of four, and by the time the fourth game came along I could only manage a couple of points before I had to go off and lie down. I was in a lot of pain.

I gave the Tuesday game of Ultimate a miss, but apart from that I've been keeping my other Ultimate commitments and just dropping the running - the result being that I've kept my fitness at a reasonable level, but not my stamina. The knee still hurts, but I felt it was about time to at least test it out - wel lactually I'd already tried testing it out a few days earlier, but I'd found that I could only run for a few minutes. This time I was pretty confident of finishing.

I went out gently, and felt a little nervous halfway through when my knee seemed to be complaining, but it held out and a time of under 29 minutes was quite pleasing - it was only 40 seconds off my best, which is a lot generally, but given it was a comeback run, I'm prepared to be forgiving!

Bring it on!

How not to train for a marathon

Happy New Year! Since I've been away for the last couple of weeks I've not updated the blog for my final run. That happened on the Wednesday before Christmas and it's now New Year's Day.

Wednesday is obviously my long run day, and this time I was due to run 16 miles I think. To cut a long story short I ended up running a shade under 20 miles and hurting my right knee. Badly enough that I still haven't been out running two weeks later, and probably won't be for a while.

Needless to say I'm pretty disappointed. The only good thing to come out of it, is that I'm pretty confident that I could have run the 26 miles that night if I'd needed to. It would have hurt, it wouldn't have been quick, but I'd have got there - and that's the main thing.

In terms of time, I was pretty happy to complete it in under 3 hours, with an average speed of over 11kph. It was a little disappointing that the outward 9.9 miles took me just 78 minutes, while the return took me 92 minutes.

Can't wait to be back!