Yoginjury

I seem to be giving Amanda a secret signal

There was always a danger it would happen. Yoga is intensely stretchy and I am not. But I had been keeping my head and never going too far into a posture. However, last Thursday, which was the last class of the series, the teacher for "Beginners 2" had not shown up. We (Beginners 1) share a hall with them although they are normally secreted behind a screen - so we can hear their funny breathing, but we cannot see them.

So this night we had our class altogether, and instead of the usual gentle babying we get from Linda our teacher, everything went up a level, in speed, number of poses held, how long they were held for and how far we should take them. I did my best to keep up. I seemed to still be intact that night but the next morning getting out of bed I found I had a nasty pain behind my left knee. It's an old injury, I think it's probably one of the tendons that tie my hamstring on to the back of my knee. That knee hyper-extends if I'm not careful and I think this was what happened. It all just got too competitive between beginners 1 and 2.

My injury was still as crotchety as hell when I got out of bed this morning, despite  being fairly careful with it yesterday, and icing. I was praying I could still run. What use is a weekend if you can't run? I was sore limping around the house, but, as I say, I've had this before and running doesn't seem to make it worse. We had a plan to go to Aberlady and run approximately 10 miles. The tide was meant to be really low at 10am. It turned out to be so. It was misty and windless and the air was soft.

When we got to the far end of Gullane beach, we hesitated for a moment, looking at a dog that looked like our friend Amanda's dog Horatio. Then out from the dunes popped Amanda and Lucy Colquhoun and Richard + Harris the dog and Kipper the dog! Much dog and human fun was had. We hadn't seen Lucy since last year so we had much to catch up on. It's hard to see how we could have got the timing much better.

After a long stop we got going again. The tide was out so far we got onto Eyebroughy (?) Island for the very first time. It smelt very fishy and there was little sign of humans being there. This was more the bird's territory I think. I was getting very hungry by then though so I had to push on. Unusually, we had parked at Aberlady bay instead of Gullane so we still had a way to go and my tank was empty....

In the end the tide was so far out, causing us to explore bits of beach that are normally under the sea, that we ran a full 12 miles rather than 10.

I'm so pleased I can still run, although my leg was sore as hell by the time I got out the car.