Well it stopped being too hot and with that I ran out of excuses really. I still managed to not run for a few days, I kept finding excuses in the morning, reassuring myself that I would get out later. Guess what. Yep. Later never happened. This morning my excuses didn’t really sounds believable, even to me. So I gave myself a talking to. ‘You’re a double Dopey’ I told myself ‘just get your butt out there and run’. I tried to convince myself that running for 8 minutes three times on a West Yorkshire August morning was not going to be anywhere near as hard as 26.2 miles in Florida January heat. ‘It’s also less fun’ niggled that little voice in my head.

Anyway, then Kath said she would come with me and given that none of my excuses had sounded plausible in my head, I wasn’t about the try them out on her. So I got dressed and off we went. It was only 8 minutes running. I mean really, 8 minutes is not a very long time. Except it is. The first 8 minutes actually felt ok. I settled into it quickly and while it started getting hard at about 5-6 minutes as we got to the steepest bit of the uphill I huffed and puffed my way up relatively happily. So far so good. 2 minute walk was enough to recover a bit and I felt ok setting off for run 2. Run 2 mostly sloped very very slightly upwards (after a sharp short down – which on the way back becomes a sharp short up – see below). The annoying slope you really only notice when you are running that way. It doesn’t feel like it slopes downwards the other way.

In run 2 my brain started not playing ball. It felt too hard, thoughts of walking a bit crept in. Excuses formed: ‘I can always try again to run it all tomorrow’ and ‘I’m just feeling a bit heavy because of all the food yesterday’ (It was Kath’s Mum’s birthday and we had a lovely roast dinner and birthday cake). Often what happens next is that we progress from that to ‘No point, can’t do it, might as well just walk, crap, can’t do it’. I managed to refocus before the real negative got hold and sent the little voice off into a corner of my brain for a time out. Instead I told myself that I really just had to run for 5 minutes because then I could turn round and head back towards home. And as I knew from run 1, 5 minutes was actually easy. I was huffing and puffing, sweat was dripping and I was barely going snail’s pace but I was going and at about 5 minutes we turned, back up a little tiny hill and then down the slope that doesn’t feel like a slope and run 2 was done.

My lungs were screaming for air as I mourned my lost fitness and cursed myself for having stopped running after the marathons last year and not really every getting going again. But after 2 minutes I had recovered enough as the watch beep told me it was time for my moonin butt to get moving again. Run 2 started with that short sharp uphill. Just a 10 second kind of hill but as I got to the top to another section which pretends to be flat – it’s the flattest on the route but at this point is really slightly upwards sloping, I felt like I had jelly legs. I was sure I couldn’t possibly run another minute even though I had only run less than a minute so far. Nope, I was going to have to admit defeat. I think I whimpered. Kath told me I’d recover now we were on the flat. ‘It’s not flat’ I felt like screaming but I had no spare oxygen for that. She told me I could do it and to remember my mantras.

Ha mantras. Yes I’d forgotten all about them. Mantras are funny things. In a way I am skeptical about them and on a cynical day (so most days) a bit dismissive. Somehow I can’t quite bring myself to accept that talking to myself and repeating affirmations or whatever is an acceptable way of getting through life or through a run. It just seems weird to me to be telling myself how amazing I am. It makes me cringe. So while I thought about how cringeworthy mantras are and all of that went through my head, I hadn’t stopped running. I was, somehow, miraculously still running. I heard Kath say ‘Come on keep going, you’re strong’. And I sort of shrugged and thought ‘well compared to three weeks ago I am, I’ve done all my strength workouts after all’ so my mantra became ‘I am strong and I can do this’. After saying it in my head three or four times, not finishing the run was no longer an option. All I had to do was get up the hill, down the other side and depending on time, up another slope for a bit. I am strong and I can do this. Car to car to gate to lamppost to car to gate to tree to wall to car… I am strong and I can do this. And I did.

Collapsing in a heap at the end of run 3 was tempting. But I kept walking for the 2 minutes as per the programme and by the end of that had recovered a fair bit. We were nearly home – just a couple more minutes of walking. It was slow and it was hard but it also reminded me that while often at the start of running or at the re-start of running things are physically hard, really hard and the sayings about running being mostly mental etc don’t really help or apply, there is absolutely still a place for training your mind to help. Yes I found the run today physically hard but I am now aware of the mental strategies available to me to push to the end of a physically hard run. I tried to just focus on something else during run 2 – I was still thinking about the run on this occasion but it was enough stop the negative spiral and I got through run 3 only because of the mantra. This is a definite advantage a running re-start has over starting for the first time I think. I have experienced runs were it’s all mental and I have tried different mental strategies. Now I just need to remember to use them as I make my way through this programme!