Week 100 – The One With The Update

Those of you who noticed that this blog had disappeared for a couple of weeks (and the beauty of English means that this sentence can indeed refer to a single person) are probably owed an explanation.

After my Les Miserables-themed last blog post, I concluded that I’d managed to pick up shin splints – my very first proper running injury. The NHS website I looked at has a long list of people who are most at risk of getting them, and the top two they list are people who “have been running for less than five years” (which I would have thought would be most people, to be honest, I don’t know many people who run for more than an hour or so at a time) and those who “run on hard surfaces or slopes”, which will be me until my continued petitions to the council to make pavements out of jelly are accepted.

The website also says that it’s very important not to “run through the pain” since that will only make things worse – as my experience last time writing showed, that does indeed happen. Fortunately there’s no treatment or anything required. Just giving it a solid two weeks rest should sort it out, and this is exactly the sort of medical advice that I can cope with.

So that explains the roughly two-week pause in updates, which was due to me sleeping instead of running. I have been running subsequently (today was my third time out since the event) but this leads to another problem at the moment, which is namely that I’ve done all of this before. It’s quite hard to write about a repeated experience, especially since the residual fitness I was carrying to begin with has faded and it’s essentially feeling the same as doing it for the first time. The podcasts are helpful but are almost exclusively music (and, in fact, the music is stuff repeated from the NHS podcasts so it’s not even new drivel to listen to).

In short, I don’t really have too much to say about the runs, and certainly not enough to write a new blog post every time I go for a jog. As such, I have decided that until I break the 5k barrier (and possibly after that) I’m going to revert to once-a-week updates.

The main issue with this is to come up with a new way of numbering posts. Naturally numbering the weeks makes sense if it’s once per week, but where to start? I started running again 6 weeks ago, I’m currently on the 4^th week of podcasts, but if I’m counting the number of weeks that I’ve actually gone for a run I think this is Week 5 now, with three never-before-broadcast runs. The best solution I figured would be to take the mean of these three options, add 95 for good luck and start at an entirely arbitrary but pleasingly-round 100. (Apologies to those of you who work in bases other than 10).

There’s no actual running update here, other than the fact that I’m still doing it (and it’s much more pleasant when the legs don’t hurt all the time while you’re doing it), but I shall aim to write about this week on Friday.

Calvin Haggis

(The food pun names are staying.)