Tag: training

The weirdness of running

Jess Guth1 Comment

Ooh it’s been a little while sine I wrote about running. I have been running though. And at the minute running is a funny thing. By all accounts it is going really well. I have run 270 miles so far this year. I can run further without walk breaks, I generally feel fitter. Little things are different. I can now say ‘I’m ‘just’ doing the sheep loop’ (about 5km) and mean the ‘just’. Running 10k is no longer a big deal and running it without walk breaks is now the norm rather than the very rare exception. Over shorter distances I am getting faster. The running is all good.

But it’s not quite doing it for me. I’m not quite as much in love with running as I should be given all that. Some of that may just be because of the marathon training plan – it’s a lot and I am struggling to do the weekly mileage it asks. In fact most weeks I don’t and that is in part playing on my mind. The other thing has, I think, been the weather. I’m not that keen on being wet and cold and I have not enjoyed being blown about by the wind. I also think that maybe I am getting a little bored of running the same canal towpath route but I’m not fit enough or confident enough to take the long runs onto the hillier routes round here.

A week ago I got my act together and headed out for my long run of 16 miles. I was going well and actually quite enjoying it. I don’t remember thinking about anything much. I ran along the canal towpath – a stretch that has recently been re-done and now has a proper path. Then, just through Silsden the path is old style and much of it is a lovely muddy mess. I was actually enjoying the concentration it took to run that section and somehow before I knew it I was 8 miles in. I turned round and started heading back. I was beginning to get a little tired. I was happy with how it was all going and though I was beginning to feel the miles, I still felt pretty strong. At almost exactly 9.5 miles my right foot slipped down the slight slope I’d been running on in the mud and it felt like my knee and ankle were going in opposite directions and I had a horrible sharp pain in my ankle. I winced but kept going but the next step resulted in an even sharper pain across my knee. I stopped and tentatively walked a few steps. The pain was intense. I was really worried I’d done some serious damage. I called Kath and asked her to come and get me. I got my location wrong so had to call her back when I realised. I was actually right bang in the middle between two points at which I could come off the towpath so I had to hobble a mile and a half. Thankfully after resting, ice and more rest it seems I did no major damage.

I then did a 4 mile and a 7 and a bit mile run during the week and then didn’t run Thursday, Friday or Saturday because quite honestly I just could not be bothered. No real excuses – just couldn’t be bothered. Today I was actually looking forward to going out and the weather looked a bit brighter. Well I managed 11 miles which I am taking as a big win because honestly, I was done by mile 1. There wasn’t anything specific really. It was all just a bit ‘meh’. I plodded along feeling a bit generally grumpy and unconvinced by everything. Every mile I really tried to stay in the mile and drag myself along landmark by landmark. The towpath was busy and 2 dogs jumped up at me and loads more got in my way – as did lots of their humans as well as humans without dogs.

It

just

felt

endless.

I just kept locking onto some sort of landmark and when I reached that, looked for the next. That worked for 10.5 miles and then everything was starting to hurt. I no longer felt strong and my landmark picks were getting closer and closer together. At 10.7 I realised that I was randomly sobbing – no idea why. I kept pushing on but I was struggling. I was coming up to a bridge on the canal that I could cross and head towards home. I’d be about 3 miles short of my plan but it would have to do because I felt both mentally and physically done. I ran to 11 miles and then walked the rest.

I’m hoping that my lack of anything in the tank is just poor fuelling (although I did sip tailwind every mile or so) or dehydration or general tiredness or even just laziness rather than getting the lurgy that poor Kath has been battling for 3 weeks now. I was a bit disappointed but I have never run 11 miles without walk breaks before and I did it on a run where I would have quite happily turned round and gone home after a mile. So again, I’m winning, the running is going well but it’s just not doing it for me.

I also had my first London Marathon anxiety dream. I was running happily along and then pulled up and stopped for some reason – not entirely clear why in my dream. Kath had already finished. I then had to get back to Dad’s flat – which in reality is in Hamburg and in my dream London looked like Hamburg, mostly anyway – and on the way I decided that I wanted to finish after all. But for some reason only Dad could tell me the way back to the embankment (which did look like the embankment) where I had apparently dropped out. Kath had had to find an official with a laptop to track me and find the point. Then everyone kept telling me that I didn’t need to finish because I’d already covered 26.2 miles in 5 hours 55 and I wasn’t going to finish the course in under 6 hours. I kept saying that I wanted the medal but Kath refused to show me the medal so I could decide if I really wanted it. I got back on the course but I have no idea if I finished the marathon or not.

So running and everything around it is a bit weird. It’s not necessarily a bad weird, just a weird weird. Running is always a hugely emotional thing. Also, I can’t really disagree that it is going really well but somehow that doesn’t feel quite right either. It’s just all a bit weird.

On Being Tired

Jess GuthLeave a comment

I am tired. I have been all week. I ran a half marathon a week ago and it went really well and I worked hard – so being a bit tired is normal. But I’ve been proper tired.

I took my planned rest day on the Monday with ‘just’ our yoga class in the evening – that’s an interesting experience on half marathon tired legs and on Tuesday dragged my butt out for the 6 ‘easy’ miles on the plan. Actually getting out was a win. It was after work, I’d been in Leeds, I was running out of steam a bit but it did me good to get out. Even though I grumbled about it being hard and horrible I did run it without walking and I did run the uphill – all of it until I hit the 6 miles beep. Then I walked .2 of a mile home.

Wednesday I was soooooo tired – I moved my speed work to Thursday and accepted I needed an extra day. Thursday I felt broken kind of tired. I felt like every time I sat still for more than 5 minutes I’d fall asleep. I was also quite tearful and anxious. We went for lunch and then I slept for nearly two hours. I did go to my yoga class in the evening and that helped me feel like I had at least achieved something that day.

Actual Running Selfie

Friday was the start of a 26 mile weekend on the plan. I think I sort of knew that it wasn’t sensible to try that but it hadn’t quite filtered through to my conscious yet. Friday was 4 miles. I did 4 miles. I had toyed with the idea of doing the missed speed work but I didn’t really feel up to it. Instead I thought I’d see if I could just manage 4 miles at roughly marathon pace and I tried my Mind T-shirt for fit and comfort. Miles 1 and 3 are perfect. Mile 2 is a little on the slow side and Mile 4 which included the uphill pull was too fast by about a minute. So all in all the average ends up bang on marathon pace. It felt good to have done something positive. I still felt tired though.

Saturday. 8 miles on plan. I thought I’d set off and try really slowly. Because Kath is not very well and we’d volunteered at parkrun all our timings for food and everything were all out and I had too big a lunch. I should have left it even longer to go run. For the first mile and a bit everything felt awful. My tummy was unsettled and I wondered if I was going to have to stop at Kath’s mum’s or my mum’s or both. By 2 miles it had settled down and by 2.5 miles I was in a nice little rhythm. I was really tired though. I thought I’d be sensible and aim for 6 miles rather than the 8. I turned round to head towards home and a little while after the turn my left achilles tendon started niggling. I agonised over what to do for a couple of strides and then decided nothing was worth risking injury now. I walked and it immediately felt fine. I walked a minute and tried running again and the niggle was back. Ok, ‘walking it is then’, I thought. Overall I covered 5.5 miles but 2 of that was walking, stopping, stretching, oh and going to the co-op to buy crisps for Kath.

Sunday. When I woke up this morning I had in my head that I was going to do the 14 miles the plan said. I had conceded that I might do it run/walk although I was really tempted to try and run it all – it would be the furthest I have ever run without walking. Anyway. Kath was struggling this morning so what I wanted to do training wise became very unimportant very quickly and we instead tried to find a way we could get Kath unstuck from the sofa and doing something positive in spite of still feeling quite poorly. We settled on Bolton Abbey where we had options in terms of distance, where there were facilities and where walking would be perfectly fine. I thought I could always make up my miles later in the day.

Looking for woodpeckers

Oh my goodness the run was as awful as the day was stunning. It felt like I had never run before in my life, like I couldn’t really breathe and like my legs had no clue what they were supposed to be doing. It was properly awful! However, it was a gorgeous sunny day and the River Wharfe was beautiful in her stillness. The ducks were pottering and there was a heron watching over the pottering. We also saw a dipper and heard woodpeckers. It was lovely to be out. We plodded slowly and walked the hills. We did the short loop and called it a win at 3.5 miles. There is no way I am making up miles today. The real or perceived niggles in my calves and my left knee and the general awfulness of the run tell me that I didn’t need a 26 mile weekend. I needed what actually would have happened if Kath hadn’t been ill – a very low mile weekend. We were meant to be going to see our friends and we would probably have run a short loop on Friday before we set off and another one on Sunday when we got back but that would have been it. That’s what I needed. I’ve still run 13.2 miles this weekend. That’s not nothing! (In fact it is more than I ran in all of February and all of March 2017!)

So why am I so tired? Well, I think there are a number of things going on here. The obvious one is that I am 63 days out from the London Marathon and I have very diligently been following a training plan that is quite different from anything I have been used to. I have been working an academic full time job and trying to settle into a sabbatical with the usual tiredness and frustration that can bring. I have been slowly working my way through an episode of depression which has its own special brand of tiredness. And, and this may be a big And, it’s the end of February. One of my fellow #Run1000Miles runners reminded me of the lovely German Word Frühjahrsmüdigkeit which probably captures exactly how many of us feel at the moment – tired, a sort inexplicable tiredness that hits us as winter slowly starts giving way to spring and we are getting used to longer days and fewer excuses to hide away and hibernate.

So the running – the plan we are following has higher weekly miles than I have ever done before and also more ‘themed’ (there’s got to be a better way of saying that but my brain is tired) sessions. It has a speed session each week – they swap to what they call strength in March and then lots of easy runs and the long runs and the odd tempo run thrown in. It’s 5 days of running a week. The attraction of this plan is that the longest training run is 16 miles. 16 miles is so much more manageable in terms of time than the usual longest of 20 or 23. You might think that another 4 miles makes little difference but when you are running them at my long slow run pace another 4 miles is almost another hour. It matters. So I have gone from training for Dopey which had 2 x 45 minute runs during the week and then back to back longish runs at the weekend with miles increasing every 2 weeks to a 5 day a week plan including speed work and tempo runs and much longer mid week runs. It’s a different sort of training and running.

The other thing is that since we got back from Dopey I have not been using run/walk intervals. I have mostly just run. I still have walk breaks – the Harewood House half was a good example of that but mostly I am trying to run the distance and only stop to walk for specific reasons – like because there’s an actual hill. I am therefore running more and that has got to make a difference too. I also have a huge number of miles in my legs. I have run over 300 miles in the last 3 months. To put that into perspective it has always taken me at least 5 months to run 300 miles before and that’s based on last year which was my fittest and furthest running year ever. In short, it is not surprising I am tired, I have run a bloody long way in a pretty short period of time and it has been a massive step up in weekly miles for me.

Plan: Do as Shack-cat does

So what happens now? Well, I think having a bit of a rest this weekend has been good. I have a rest day tomorrow and I have banned all thoughts of catching up on missed speed sessions. I am dropping back into the plan tomorrow and tomorrow is a rest day. I will reduce the 6 miles easy on Tuesday to a ‘sheep loop’ (about 3.25 miles) run on Tuesday morning before I go to the theatre with mum and then, all being well I will pick up the speed work on Wednesday – but going back to the next one on the list rather than the one set for that date. I will keep trying to eat well and fuel for the miles that I am doing and I will keep trying to properly rest when I am not running. I will also give myself one almighty kick up the arse to get better at stretching and strengthening – my yoga classes help but they are not enough. I need little and often. And on that note I am off to dust off my yoga mat!

It’s at times like this, when you have to come off plan, when things don’t go quite as they were mapped out and doubts start creeping in when remembering the WHY is so important. You can help me and Kath to keep our WHY in focus by supporting us to support Mind. Sponsor us here.

2018 Running: Further, Stronger, Happier

Jess Guth1 Comment
2018 pledge!

2018 started with a pledge try and run 1000 miles. I never really thought I’d get all the way there. I did say in my first post of the year that I really wanted to have a crack at it but in my head my A Goal was 750 miles, B goal was to run more than in 2017 and C to get out and run and enjoy it. Well I have well and truly smashed 2018! My Year end total is 810.34 miles

January was cold and icy and I struggled to get myself out the door on loads of occasions. I found running hard but I still had some fantastic adventures running at the Bolton Abbey Estate and in London’s Hyde Park with Kath, running to work meetings in Saltaire and surviving a work team building couple of days in the Lake District. I was pushed out of my comfort zone which basically set the tone for the rest of the year – but in a good way.

February saw a fair bit of canal towpath running and it also saw me not finish the Harwood House Half Marathon. It was the first time that I really didn’t mind a DNF and enjoyed the part of the race that I managed. My hip was sore though and took a while to recover. February gave way to March and my running mojo and mileage didn’t pick up – in fact they plummeted further. There was snow and I was restless and grumpy about running. My chart shows a scattering of short runs with long gaps in-between.


April was better. I got my shit together and I got my backside round the Hawkshead 10km run and enjoyed it. In spite of the very slow pace and the terrifying downhill I loved it. I look back at it often and it somehow seems like one of the defining moments of 2018 in running terms. I found it impossible, the uphill, the mud, the slippery slate downhill but I loved it. And the adventures didn’t stop there. We ran in Bronte country, we ran almost to Burnsall, we ran our canal loops that were beginning to look alive in the spring sunshine and I meandered happily into May.

May brought more epic adventures. We conquered the Toronto Half marathon and I suddenly believed that I might have a 2.45 half marathon in me. I missed it this time but I hadn’t really believed I could go under 2.50 so a 2.48 was awesome. We ran on the Moors here and I ran in London and it was all quite lovely. In June the mileage dropped a little and I don’t really remember much about June running. It was fairly consistent but I didn’t blog much so maybe it was just uneventful. It ended with Day 1 of Endure 24 and July began withDay 2 and saw me go beyond marathon distance for the first time ( 6 x 5 mile laps) even if mostly walking.

July was all about low mileage but epic locations. We were in Australia. I ran on the beach, in the rainforest and the Brisbane Parkrun as well as tourist-running epic landmarks like the Sydney Opera House. Australia running was mind-blowing. We also registered for the Dopey Challenge while we were there so our running adventures were set to continue!

August saw the mileage increase again and I broke through the 500 mile mark. While that was fantastic I mentally struggled in August and my black pup was hanging around. September started well with the Great North Run (which I never did fully blog about but it was a solid half marathon which could have been epic if I’d been able to keep my head together. I learned a lot!). Then after that I got a horrible cold/flue thingy that I just could not shake off. When I eventually did I came back strong. The last three months of running have been solid. Mostly they have been enjoyable and while there have been tantrums and meltdowns – particularly on the long distances – I have not, other than in the heat of the moment, fallen out of love with running. I want to run!

December has been my highest mileage month ever. I haven’t pushed for that, it just happened. And I have enjoyed December and still feel physically strong. It’s almost like I might actually feel ready for Dopey! So what has 2018 taught me? Well, it’s taught my to enjoy running and to focus on enjoying it, to make that the key motivation not a side effect or nice to have. I’ve used my hashtag of #MyRunMyRules less but embraced the spirit of it more. I am getting much better at ignoring what I think is a respectable pace and doing my thing. I am growing in confidence and I am embracing a spirit of adventure. Looking back at the year I know I had low points, I know I had a fair bit of ‘I can’t do this’ and ‘it’s all f-ing pointless’ but I don’t really remember that. I have run better, further, stronger and most importantly happier than ever before. The pictures dotted through this post show some of the running moments and memories that encapsulate that (although many of my favourite moments weren’t captured because they were not that sort of moment). I am excited to see what 2019 brings.

Happy New Year!

4 at 40

Jess Guth2 Comments

It’s my birthday today. When I woke up this morning I had slept myself happily into my next decade. It was still early. Kath was even still in bed next to me and the cats had only just started pestering. Kath got up and I enjoyed a cup of tea in bed and a lazy start reading and cuddling cats – until they had enough. I think Shackleton’s face says it all!

After another cuppa and a West Wing re-run I had birthday pancakes and opened my presents. All very exciting and lovely. After a while spent looking at today’s and yesterday’s goodies I wanted to go and get some air and move a bit. I was looking forward to a run. We toddled off nice and gently starting with the first part of what we call our sheep loop. It’s called that because it goes past the fields where we used to have our sheep. The name has stuck even though we no longer have the flock.

We plodded through the wood and down the golf course and just as we turned onto the canal towpath Kath saw the kingfisher cut across the canal. I missed it. Never mind, there were plenty of ducks, geese, pheasants, sheep and dogs with their humans to see. We headed towards Silsden a bit and then turned round. Running felt normal, just something I do. Not hard or laboured, not really easy either, it just was. It felt good.

At 4 miles I wanted to stop – somehow it seemed right to do 4 miles today. 1 for each of my decades. I felt like I could have kept running for a long time but I didn’t want to. I wanted to have a leisurely walk along the canal and up home for the rest of the loop and I wanted to maintain the symmetry of 4 at 40 – so that’s what we did.

The rest of the day will be taken up with setting up my new camera (thank you Dad!), having a bath (there is something so luxurious and indulgent about having a bath in the middle of the afternoon) and then tucking into lots of yummy picnic food when the mothers arrive later. It’s been a lovely birthday already!

If you’d like to help me celebrate, seeing the fundraising total for mine and Kath’s London Marathon for Mind creep up a bit more today would really make me smile so if you can, please do send a couple of quid their way.

Happy Boxing Day everyone!

Christmas 800

Jess Guth3 Comments

I hope you’re all having a lovely Christmas day. Mine’s been quiet and nice. Most of it spent preparing Christmas dinner and eating it and then we watched the first Fantastic Beasts film which I like. I’d like a niffler – they’re a good mix of cuddly and mischievous.

Anyway we started our Christmas with a short run at Bolton Abbey when Kath finished work yesterday. Just a mile out and a mile back weaving round people on the out and choosing the top path to avoid them on the way back. I could definitely feel the weekend’s 11 + 17 miles in my legs but nothing was hurting or even achey – just a bit tired and heavy. It was the perfect stretch of legs on a perfect, lovely day.

Christmas Day began with a short run. It was still pretty much dark when we set off. Just at the end of our road we bumped into a lovely little dog called Rosie and her human and stopped to say Merry Christmas. Then we plodded on towards the canal towpath and along the silvery magic of the early morning canal. No people, just moonlight, a few ducks and some geese.

We walked up the former golf course and stopped for a Christmas morning kiss half way up the first slope. As we were about to carry on we heard deer off to one side – we saw a hint of movement but nothing more. We walked on up and then through the wood and stopped briefly when our favourite tree came into view.

Then we jogged down the other side until we got to about 2.25 miles and a formerly icy puddle which marked my 800 year to date miles spot.

800 miles. I feel a bit overwhelmed by that. I’ve done it without chasing the miles or pushing and I still have a few days left even! So maybe 1000 miles in on for 2019 and I am very much looking forward to having fun trying and taking the pledge again.

Anyway, Christmas morning started with a really lovely run and I went because I wanted to not because it justified my Christmas dinner or something silly like that. I went because being out on a foggy, dark morning like today makes you believe that there is just a touch of magic in the world. And who doesn’t need that!