Today is a good day to talk about the wall.
I've never seen a formal
definition of this phenomenon, but as I understand it, you hit the wall when
you've been running for a while and you're fairly sure at this point you've
used all the energy in your body and your skin starts to turn green as chlorophyll
creeps in in a desperate attempt to photosynthesise to make up the energy
deficit in your body. Either that or you actually physically hit a wall, which
is not recommended.
Of the two, I actually did
neither. The latter didn't seem like a good idea, and the former wasn't
possible because I was wearing my reflective jacket and was therefore the
biggest light source in the area, and you don't see many plants on the sun.
What did happen, though, was a
lot of exhaustion about ten minutes into the 25 minute run. I suspect part of
the issue was the realisation on Monday that the pace I was doing meant that I
wasn't going to be finishing the 5km run in the 30 minutes, due to having the
stamina of a sloth on a spa weekend and the speed of a First Great Western
train under normal conditions - neither any good at all. So I decided to pick
up the pace for the first few minutes, to start enthusiastically as I mean to
go on. Unfortunately my body took that to mean that it would be mean if I went
on, and subsequently decided to have an oxygen party to which I wasn't invited.
This meant that the final 15 minutes were very miserable and very slow, like
the anti-Usain Bolt.
It didn't help that I managed to
get slightly lost again. At the start of this week's podcast Laura told me that
maybe I should consider changing my route if I was finding it a bit boring.
This was one situation where I have been way ahead of her - I don't think I've
done the same route twice yet. This has however led to no small amount of poring
over Google Maps the night before the run to try and plot out an alternate
route, and also leads to situations like today where I ended up with a very
convoluted path to take - and jogging along whilst trying to remember
"Left to the end of the road, left again, right, second right, first
right, left at the end of the road, right then left", it's very easy to
accidentally put in another right and discover a whole new road. (A new
fantastic point of view).
But I did manage to finish the
full 25 minutes, and furthermore ended up going 2.5 miles today, slightly
further than Monday or Friday. And all I had to do for that extra 7 yards a
minute was use every available ounce of energy and finish feeling like I'd
overdosed on air. Still, I broke the 4km barrier (possibly by running very hard
into the wall just in front of it), and maybe 5km isn't so unattainable after
all.
The leg pain that had somewhat disappeared by Monday has now come
back, though. On the one hand, it makes running a bit of a pain in more than
one way; on the other, it’s nice to have a fitness problem which can be
resolved by spending more time lying in bed. Now there’s an Olympic sport I
could get behind!
Breathe Ledger
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