Week 5 Run 1 – The One That Was More Physical Than Mental

And thus begins the two weeks that are supposed to get me up to running constantly. The program for the next six runs involve an individual podcast and individual running schedule for each session, intended to take out the recovery walks. As far as I’m concerned this seems to be about as good an idea as getting rid of the recovery ward from a hospital, but we’ll see how this goes.

I managed to survive this morning’s run – and “survive” is definitely the right word there. The run for today was five minutes running, three minutes walking, five running, three walking, five running; so slightly less running than last week, but with much less recovery time. And I definitely noticed the difference.

Astonishingly I managed to get through the first five minutes without feeling dreadfully awful, which I guess shows that I am improving slowly in fitness. Laura has a way of making you feel bad about this, though – just after the second run she said something along the lines of “You should be finding you need less time to recover. If so, then that’s great, that’s a sign that your fitness is improving!” Unfortunately, at that point I was basically gasping for air, which didn’t really make me feel too great about the whole improving fitness theory.

I was also gifted with this gem of wisdom at the start of the run – “You’ll probably find that the difficulty in this run is more mental than physical.” Well, despite not being in the best mental state I’ve ever been in come the start of the run, I was still convinced that the physical side of things was going to be the hard bit. After all, I could sit down right now and think about running a marathon. There, I just did it whilst writing that sentence. And I don’t feel particularly worn out by doing that. In fact, I could probably do it again. And I just did. Now, despite being very mentally prepared for the marathon, I suspect that if I went out and tried it, I wouldn’t succeed, and that would probably be a physical issue. I don’t recall seeing many runners giving up halfway through the London Marathon saying “I feel really great, I could run for hours yet, but my brain’s a bit tired so we’re going to go home and watch My Big Fat Operation On Something That Looks Really Weird, Live In The Big Brother House +1 on BBC3 to give it a rest.”

No, I reckon my inability to run very far at the moment is still predominantly physical.

I have one more run on Wednesday before on Friday I’ll be expected to go for 20 minutes without stopping. I just about scraped through 15 with breaks today, so I have no idea how I’ll be able to manage that. If you’re expecting to see me at all on Friday, you’re probably best to go ahead and assume I won’t be there. Try the recovery ward of the local hospital, if Laura hasn’t convinced them to get rid of it and replace it with a nice drink of water and a banana.

Kristen Stum-Bell.