Room

It's the most unusual preparation for a marathon I've done yet. I haven't run a step since my weird knee flare-up last Monday night. I've google diagnosed myself with bursitis now, on the strength of this description of the symptoms..."pain straightening and bending your legs". The worst times have been at night in bed. I'm alright on my back with my legs straight for a while but then my back gets sore. Bending my legs once they've set straight is like opening a wound. Lying on my side is a challenge. Some nights my knees will tolerate it, other nights it makes them burn with the unholy fire of Satan. "What the hell are you talking about?" "Don't ask me. I'm a bit short of sleep."

By Friday at work I was a bit short of sleep and let it slip when, gazing out the window for a moment,  I told my colleague and buddy Ann "Oh look they've got one of those light-up Santas on the wall at the Clerry Inn". It seemed a bit puzzling since we were well past Christmas. This made Ann look up and as I looked a second time it morphed into a rather naff faux-bronze, faux-old fashioned lamp. No Santa to be seen anywhere. Oops.

"How are you holding up with the lack of exercise?" I hear you ask, " a seasoned athlete like yourself will be struggling without an outlet". Well as it happens I do have an outlet, but it's a bit...insular.

There's a whole preamble to this but I'll just give you the broad strokes. A bit back I developed a desire for a smart bike-trainer; one where you can hook up to a virtual world and go cycling in Cyber-Space. I can give you reasons why it's a good idea but the ideas didn't come first, just the wanting it. I've always had a thing for technology. The smart-trainer was quite expensive - I'm not telling you how much - and when I got it I discovered that neither my computer's nor my laptop's graphics cards were up to the job of running the software I wanted to use with it. By this time PB was having a hairy fit just at the sheer indulgence of it all - so was I, neither of us grew up particularly wealthy so the voices asking me why I needed an indoor bike-trainer and a virtual world when I had two actual bikes and an actual world grew quite loud and insistent. I stunned them into silence by ordering a quite expensive gaming laptop with a more than adequate graphics card. Take that you miserable voices!!!

It was a financial blood-bath.

But I couldn't have been set up much better for the current crisis. My knees don't mind cycling - well not too much - that's within their range.

So that's what I've been doing. I've cycled 84 indoor miles this past week. It's not a lot by cyclist standards but it is quite a lot of sweating in your bedroom. I need to put down a mat.

So who knows if I will be a runner again by Manchester Marathon time. I certainly hope so. My legs got a lot better towards the end of the week. I had a deep tissue massage booked already and that helped a lot - probably not the actual injuries, but easing up all the tissues surrounding them. Coming out of there I could walk normally on the flat for the first time since Monday. Not downhill though. On Thursday things seemed to continue to improve and I wasn't all that uncomfortable in bed. By Friday I was considering going to do a Parkrun on Saturday and then for some reason my legs gave me merry hell overnight - maybe I'd overdone it at work.

I'm starting to find going outside weird though. The sky is so high, and the air is very fresh, and nobody has their name above their head.