Half marathon in the books
This morning I set out on a long run with a fairly ambitious route planned, and despite not quite making it the whole way (more on that later), I did still manage to make it 21km, my longest run to date and the length of a half marathon, give or take 100m or so. When I stopped, about 3km away from where I had hoped to, I was in a lot of pain, not least because both my nipples were bleeding. Fortunately, my mum came and brought my a fresh t-shirt, water and money to buy ice cream, for which she is an absolute hero.
On one hand, of course I’m upset that I didn’t push myself for those last few kilometres. In a life or death scenario, I probably could’ve made them, but I’d also known for the entire duration of the run (and knew as soon as I planned to try this route) that it was a pretty stupid thing to even try, as it was a massive increase to both my long run and weekly mileage - not what you’re meant to do at all. Equally if I’m continued I think there would’ve been a huge chance of getting injured (or at least, getting more injured than my bloody shirt may have suggested), so I’m not going to hold it against myself too much.
For the most part the run was very enjoyable, things actually felt great until about 15km. The route was a little bit of an adventure, trying to stick to the coastal paths as much as possible led me to run through a lot of bushes, have to turn back because I was about to enter an in-use pistol range, and an unwelcome detour onto a rocky beach which I assumed would lead back to a path, but in fact just lead to a small (and impassable) reservoir. The pain didn’t really kick in until the north coast, and eventually led me to feel something that I’ve not yet felt in my experience of running so far - the feeling of “this isn’t fun, I hate this, why the fuck am I doing this?”. At the time nothing really sprang to mind, because I was too tired to really be thinking much of anything by that point, but I’m going to prepare some retorts for the next time that particular question rears its head.
From now on, there’s not going to be any more bad ideas and I’m going to do things properly, slowly increasing how much I do a week, and running for time rather than distance on my long runs, which will all by shorter than today, at least for the next couple of months. The focus is going to be on setting a good time at the Mind 10k in September and trying to max out the easy beginner gains on my 5k.
My post run weight (post re-hydration but pre eating 1400 calories of Ben & Jerry’s) was 89.5kg. I’ve been trying to think of the last time I was under 90kg and I’m pretty sure it was when I was 16 or 17, and while there is plenty more work to go, it seems like running might finally be the thing that gets me to the goal weights that I’ve been chasing for a decade now.