December

 

 It's been amazing to me how long I've been injured for - and as long as I get the full use of that leg back, it has actually been quite good. I can't imagine what else would have given me the necessary motivation to go and get swimming again and think about some other activities to balance up just always running.

I went a wee run yesterday and I survived it and I could have gone again today, but I put the question to myself and the answer came back that I would rather do a sport that involved lying doing in warm water!

So off I went swimming. It's still not a comfortable thing, but Edinburgh Leisure "upgraded" their booking system at the weekend and as a consequence it seems to be running slow and some of the links for booking are broken - perhaps as a result of that the pool was pretty empty today and I had my most spacious swim so far. I'm now doing mostly front-crawl (I jist call it that because it makes Peter shout "Free-style" at me.) What I really want is to get comfortable enough with free-style breathing so I can also do it in the sea for longer than just short bursts.

I started reading the book about Total Immersion swimming again, which is about how to reduce your drag in the water. It all makes sense - but then I started watching swim coaching videos on You Tube and it has other people who disagree with the TI approach. I should have known better than to think that there would be one right way to do swimming. Nothing else is like that. The more you get to know about a thing the more you realise there are various ways of doing everything and there's never full agreement about it. Anyway, it's fun playing around with technique and takes my mind off drowning.

I am usually not the slowest person in my lane now anymore.. Woo-hoo.

Ever since I admitted to myself that I may be an aging runner, I have known that I should really be doing some strength training - but again, couldn't really be arsed. Well that's not fair. I used to have a bit of a routine that I would do but then when my shoulder froze early in the year that knocked out about half of it and I let the other half go. So I thought since I'd transitioned to going swimming fairly smoothly, maybe I could start using the gym again. I booked myself in for an introduction to the gym and even though I really didn't want to go I forced myself.

I have to emphasise that everyone was perfectly nice to me but I was pretty sure I could see in the eyes of the guy who was taking me round that he wondered what the fuck I was doing there. Actually somebody else was supposed to be taking me round but then they ditched me and another guy who seemed to be eastern european introduced himself. I told him I'm a runner but I've had a shoulder injury so I wanted to develop my upper body strength but I don't think he understood what I said. He made me do an embarrassing warm up about 4 feet away from him and then he took me round the machines. Pointless running machines set to go at 6mph. Pointless bikes which you can pedal while watching anything on Netflix.

There were three machines particularly for your upper body and I realised pretty soon that they were the hot ticket  of gym-land and were inhabited by a perpetual; stream of sweaty guys. The guy who was showing me round showed me ways to do the same exercises with weights and the wire-pull I don't know what it is thing machine at the back. After that he set me free to go and try all the things myself, so I did, but got more interested in watching other people stumbling along on treadmills looking at their phones. I was just realising how much I wasn't looking forwards to going back there regularly when I realised I didn't have to and so I didn't.

But what to do? How was I to develop my physique? I bought a book called strength training for the 50+ off t'internet and I've found a wee routine to do which I've done three times. I have so often dipped in and out of the idea of regularly doing strength training that without realising it I had collected everything I need. I have free-weights, ankle weights and resistance bands.

After going running yesterday my legs had stiffened up today and it made me realise how much I am no longer used to perpetually hard stiff limbs.

So I hope I get properly better and can start running longer distances again but also I don't want to stop swimming. Or biking. Cycling isn't so great in the winter but I've been really enjoying my cycles. The worst thing is cycling on the roads. I used to be better able to ignore the continual threat to life of cars and lorries sweeping by much too close but now no longer can - so it takes really some thinking and planning to get good off-road routes.

I better go. It'll be Christmas before we know it.