Michelle’s Marathon Madness : I Got The Running Blues
Look at any guide to running the marathon and they’ll tell you there’s a honeymoon period when you first start training when it feels amazing and each additional mile comes with a new high you just can’t get enough of.
What they’ll also say is that it’s very likely that after a few weeks of this high you’ll hit the ground with a very large thud, something I have to say I thought was a tad dramatic.
Well that was until last week.
Last week marked week 17 before the marathon, one week before week 16, the week when any serious marathon runner really should be getting down to some serious hardcore training.
It also marked the week when I completely lost my sense of humour about the whole thing.
In fact I didn’t only mislay my sense of humour, I lost all motivation for anything to do with the marathon full stop. The thought of running filled me with dread, the runs themselves were horrendous and however fast or slow I ran I couldn’t find any sort of pace that allowed me to get anywhere near that daydreamy stage. Oh, and if you thought it was a good idea to joke about my running then you didn’t after when I’d burnt a hole in your head with the evils I gave you.
So what do you do when you’ve got something as big as the marathon to train for but would rather be doing anything but?
Well there’s one magic formula that I’m going to share with you all. You stop being such a fool about it and you get over it.
For me that’s meant mixing up my routes. So now instead of pounding the streets and playing the “My god that house is 12 times the size of mine however did they afford it, let’s depress ourselves a little more” game, I’ve started darting off down public footpaths that head to who knows where, and it’s worked a treat for two reasons.
The first is it’s November and there’s not a dry bit of muddy track about. This means as soon as I head off down one of these footpaths it feels like I’ve begin Army Assault Course training. Now if I was sensible, on hitting these tracks I would begin by tentatively putting my foot down, but seeing as I’m now in the Army (go along with me on this) then there’s no room for something as girly as that, so instead I thump my foot down as though I’m still pounding the streets, leading one of two things to happen:
1. The ground opens up, sucks my foot up, and I get well and truly stuck, thus spending the next 30 seconds trying to wiggle it out again like a fool (obviously still running on the spot with my other foot to keep my heart rate up…)
2. My foot goes down then appears to keep going down for at least another metre and comes back up filled with water.
Once this has happened I then begin, and I presume this looks very strange because I feel rather a prat doing it, the leap from the millimetre of grass on one side of the track to the millimetre on other to try and keep my feet marginally dry. I have to admit this doesn’t sound like the best thought out plan, and well to be honest it doesn’t really work at all as I tend to spend most of it sliding along on muddy patches and the rest of it tripping over logs and branches, but it not only focuses my mind off the “poor me” frame of mind I’ve got myself into but sees a couple of miles fly past without me even noticing.
And then there’s the second reason. Going down public footpaths where I live tend to lead you to end up in the middle of nowhere (the other day I ended up in a field so large I couldn’t actually seen anyone or anything else from any angle and did wonder if the world had come to an end whilst I’d been running through a wood), and my house definitely isn’t in the middle of nowhere leading me into a blind panic (usually because I have a conference call with someone in about 30 minutes time) that I somehow need to find my way home and then running definitely doesn’t seem like a chore – it’s a necessity!
On top of route changes my running playlist has been switched off on my iPhone and replaced with podcasts (I’d recommend it for banishing those unmotivating voices in your head – you can only have some many voices talking at once and the volume on my iPhone goes louder than the voices in my head) and I’ve got a whole new respect for this running thing – in fact after beginning to think I wasn’t sure I could actually even run a mile properly any more I went out this morning and knocked 25 minutes off my half marathon time doing what was essentially nothing more than an easy jog!
