Trying to do a 20 miler.

I've been trying to run a 20 miler since Saturday.

Saturday, well, it had been a long hard week and I didn't feel like it. I persuaded myself out by telling myself to be flexible. I could set out on a long run and then if I was hating it or it was going badly I could bail. Bail I did at Prestonpans. As soon as I told myself I was allowed to stop at Prestonpans my little legs went quicker. It was a 10 mile run. You have to ask yourself, if you hate running long this much, why do it. At the station, who should show up but old clubmate Alan Aitchison. 

His wife Gillian is getting treated for breast cancer just now. They're going through it. We talked about that and we talked about running and we talked about people from the club who we haven't seen for ages. He did a very good impression of fellow club-mate Graham Henry expressing one of his unbridled truths. " A GARMIN! IF YOU'RE A SHIT RUNNER A GARMIN'S NOT GOING TO HELP YE!"

I went home and put my feet up, read a book and had a snooze. I could revisit long running another day.

The next day it was sunny and beautiful and it was a day for going to Gullane. I had it in the back of my mind that maybe I'd want to run long the next day so I should try and save my legs. I felt perky though and wanted to run harder. Peter had been on a long run the day before and wanted to tell me all the details. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

As we rounded the corner onto Aberlady bay the clouds came in and the things in the distance disappeared and it all got a bit mysterious. It was lovely and warm though. 

We came to an orange bush and had a bee off. Whoever gets the best picture of a bee wins. I definitely won. Peter doesn't know how to be quiet and still long enough to let the bees come closer. But I only seemed to get pictures of bee's bottoms.

I tried a pink bush to see if I would have any more luck. It smelled nice. The bees buzzed. It's hard to capture them though.

While all this was going on, some tics came and took advantage. We noticed them because I saw one on my arm - pinged it off and saw that they were playing 5-a-side on Peter's legs. I pinged them all off. There were none on my legs at all. Too leathery.

It was a nice run. I could have run much further than the 6 miles we covered, but I needed to save my legs, and anyway, we had to go to buy a telly.

So I'd hatched a plan for today to get the train to North Queensferry Station. My accrued sense of failure from not doing long runs was finally giving me enough motivation to do one. I figured if I ran straight back from NQ I'd hit 20 miles round about Musselburgh and I could get the train home from there.

I've also been thinking about pace. The advice that I've read many times is that you should run your marathon long runs 60 - 90 seconds slower than you intend to run in the marathon. As I only really want to go sub 4 hours, it occurred to me that I'm pushing too hard. And maybe if I was to stop pushing I would stop hating the whole business so much. I was going to test it out today.

I'd never run from N. Queensferry, and fucked it up immediately by running right down to the bottom of the hill and then having to scramble up the steep grassy bank under the bridge to get up and on it.
It had been forecast to be sunny just until about 10am, and so I figured I'd missed it. Happily it stayed sunny and bright for pretty much the whole run.

The bridge feels surprisingly airy and exposed, and the railing doesn't feel high enough. What if you were to just jump off by accident?

Five miles into it and I was still feeling okay. The birds were singing, it was a lovely day.

I could hear woodpeckers in the Dalmeny woods.

9 miles into it and it occurred to me that if I added in the 'airport run', maybe I could just run home instead of all the way to Musselburgh. This is a 4 and a bit mile loop that is mostly off road,

I was planning to have a stop at the cafe on the Prom at Cramond and have a cake or something and maybe a coffee to lift my spirits for the last 5 or so miles. It was shut though. I'd run past 2 open cafes to get there too. I didn't have any more water but I did happen to have a Coop cherry flapjack in my rucksack, so I ate that carefully. It was pretty dry without a drink, but it was nice and I think it helped. This was at 15.5 miles and I hadn't eaten anything since before I started so I was ready for it.

It was a day for panoramas. There were big skies and fluffy clouds everywhere I went all day.

The last miles felt pretty crap, but I was thinking about the scrambled egg and cheese I was going to eat when I got home, and that kept me cheery. After the prom there were 2 miles of Granton and then I cut up the cycle path. Out of 20.5 miles of running I think only 6 were in traffic. An impressively green day out.

So it was a slow run, slowed down a bit more by going the airport run, but I definitely didn't suffer as much. There was less self-pity in the last couple of miles! But do I really have to do another one next weekend?

More twists and turns.

So last weekend we were running with Nick W and remembered that it was the Dunbar 10K this weekend. I had originally wanted to do it and then saw it was a Porty championship race, which had taken the shine off. 10K = fast = me not fast =  not good. Porty championship race = too many witnesses. And then I'd been thinking that since I needed to do weekend long runs for marathon training that I didn't know how to fit in a Sunday 10K. But then I felt so shabby on the long run that I thought well maybe it's a good idea not to run long and do a wee sharpener instead, painful to both pride and body as that would be.
So on Monday I was thinking, yeah okay, Dunbar 10K it is.

 Then on Tuesday at work I had to use the work lap-top and picking it up and twisting very slightly to the left I suddenly got a lavish, white hot pain shooting out in all directions from the lower left quadrant of my torso....back and hip area. Someone was talking to me and I had to just breathe for a moment or two before I could say anything. At the time I couldn't put any weight at all on my left foot. My brain was doing super-fast calculations about the possible consequences of all this...it was mostly about running....things like "This better not fuck your running. Will you be able to run? Is this real? Will I not be able to run? Maybe it'll just pass." I got to where I could use my left leg, which was helpful, but the news wasn't good. I couldn't straighten up. Sitting was sore. Standing was sore. As it happened there were things that I just absolutely had to get done that day so I stayed and suffered through it. I'll tell you what. It's amazing if you work in a room full of nurses the volume and variety of tablets that appear if you say out loud "Has anyone got any painkillers?". I was soon furnished with enough pain relief to give me a good sleep for a week. I went easy. I'm reluctant to even take paracetamol.

I went quite quickly from thinking I wanted to run a 10K at the weekend to remembering nostalgically how only that morning I had walked down the corridor, standing up straight, and not appreciating how good it is to move easy and free. It was all a total bollocks and there was no point in thinking about the future.

The great thing about an injury is you don't get to sleep either because it's sore in bed. Every turn was a major operation of trying to ease myself over and not wake up the monster in my back. Every time this failed and I'd get shooting spasms of pain.

The next day I had two commitments. In the morning I thought I'd make them somehow. I'm not used to cancelling things and it feels all wrong. Mid-morning I cancelled thing number 1 and then by midday I realised I had to cancel thing number 2. Walking around the flat was a major challenge. Once everything was cancelled I settled down and read a book and slept and woke up and mooched about and I felt much happier.

The next day I seemed a bit better so I went out a wee tentative 4 miler. I was disheartened to see that sub 10 minute pace seemed unattainable, at least for the first three. Mile 4 was up hill and that felt better. My back was uncomfortable, but not terrible, for the whole run. I thought it was a mistake but probably not a disaster. It stayed uncomfortable for the rest of the day.

Friday I was back at work and had no time to run. As the entry for the 10K had closed on entry central the night before, I thought that was definitely off the table.
I did some very careful yoga in the evening when I got home and something melted in my lower back as I was doing a forward bend with wide legs. (Whatever that's called.) It was a lovely feeling and afterwards I was walking tall again. I couldn't do a right side bend, but you don't need that to run.

Saturday I was feeling much more normal - which was tired and stiff but fairly robust. Nick W pointed out that there was entry on the day. Peter was getting increasingly keen to do Dunbar. I won't say it was because he'd realised that Willie was doing the Tom Scott 10 miler so 10 championship points were up for grabs - but that was actually the reason.

We went for the standard Gullane sea, sand, sky and wildlife 6 miler and my thoughts were if I was okay at the end of 6 bumpy miles I was good to risk a 10k.
It is always lovely to get outdoors and out the city and even though I was stiff and slow, I enjoyed it, and was no worse at the end than when I set out.

Sooooooooo.....we decided to do the 10K.

Are you flagging? I know I am. I'll keep this snappy, I promise.
Championship-wise I have one main rival. Fen Parry. She was a Porty about a decade ago and disappeared with a sore foot and has recently re-emerged. She beat me at the Prom 4 miler, and I beat her at the Portobello Park run in February. If you'd asked me if I could beat Fen at 10K about a month ago I'd have said I had a good chance. But she's been doing marathon training and I've been...yeah I don't know. I've been doing no speed training and hating long running and then I hurt my back. And I notice that I have thickened through the middle a bit. It's nasty what you find out when the sun returns and you take your thicker layers off...

I thought it likely that if I had any chance of beating Fen today, it would be thus. Hammer the uphill mile and try to create enough distance so she doesn't know where I am...then try to keep going.
So that's what I set out to do. Mile one was nasty. Into mile 2 I could hear Fen behind me. She has distinctive breathing. She passed me. I passed her. Going up the hill I raised the pace. She matched it. I raised it. She matched it.  I didn't have any more and I knew it. All my sirens were going off, I was wheezing and I had nothing left to give. She had me by the top of the hill.

It took a while to regain my composure at the top of the hill, by which time the Porty ladies (Julie and Aileen had been on the hill too, but they had not been targets.) had disappeared off forwards as I had planned to. Meanwhile Eric Foster caught me up.

Now I'm not one for talking in a race. And I'm not one for running with others. And I'm not one for people 'pacing' me. I like a bit of space. But Eric is a lovely human being. And he had clearly decided that I needed a bit of help, so he was going to run with me, chat for a while, maybe even 'pace' me. Two, three times I tried to persuade him that he should save himself and leave me to my fate, but he was determined. So I gave in. Every time I slowed down, Eric wasn't for it and harried me into picking it up. He used an impressive coaching salad of carrot and stick, telling me to relax, keep trying, head up, that I was going really well. I handed my brain over to him.

As I crossed the line and slowed I could feel an impressively insistent pulse in the artery going into the base of my skull and wondered if I was going to have a stroke and then take a year off work learning how to talk again. Nothing like that happened, although there's still time.

There was an embarrassment of Porties and they won a sea of prizes. It was good to see Aileen Ross back out running again. Dunbar RC did a bang up smooth job of organising the whole thing and the results were up before you could say 'maybe it was a hard day out there and everyone ran slowly'. Actually it seems there was a course record...