Early morning session

Last run this week before the races this weekend. No real plans as to how far I was going to run when I left the house, except that I knew that I wanted to run a little further than my normal 10k route. However, I also had to balance my running time against getting into work time. What was I to do : 15km and get to work late or 10km and not satisfy my desire to put some mileage in. I settled for 12.

I set off down the main road with my close friend: the pain in my right thigh. I've been suffering with this for a while now, probably about 2 months as it appeared around the time of the London marathon. I have had a quick search on the internet to try and understand what it may be and the only plausible answer would appear to be a stress fracture in the femur. The pain begins as soon as I start running and then eases off when the endorphines quick in at around 5k. It's more of a dull ache than a sharp pain and I've not been letting it bother me but it doesn't appear to be going away. Anyway, I was thinking of this as I set off and taking it easy down the road, getting into the rhythm and dragging myself out of my sleep at the same time. I looked at the Garmin as it signalled the first kilometre : 5:04 !

I could hardly believe it. I thought that I'd been taking it easy but not that easy. I resigned myself to the fact that I was slow this morning and trudged on at the same pace. The second kilometre flashed up on the watch now : 4:48 - this was already an improvement and I noticed that I was a good 100 metres beyond the usual 2km marker. This was the Garmin playing up again for that 1st k. It had obviously taken a little longer to catch the satellites hence the time. This was confirmed when I went through 3k in 4:48 too - at least I'm regular.

I woke up from this point on and the pain subsided in my thigh. I thought about how well I've been running recently and my gradual return to form since London. The long runs in the Auvergne have also helped and I'm as ready as I'll ever be for the long trail on Sunday. At the same time, I'm dreading that exhausted, hungry, too tired to take another step feeling that hits after 30-40 k and you know you still have another couple of hours to run before finishing. I put this behind me and sped up - 4:30 then 4:25 in the forest and finally finishing back through town with a 4:17 then 4:07 pace. 

12 km all up in 54:50 or 4:34 average pace. A good run and despite my efforts to keep it short, it took me 2 hours to get to work in the traffic this morning. Arrived at 9:50 am and should have run a 15k after all.