Keeping it up

Hello again people. I know, I know, there was all that stuff about whether I should carry on the blog or not, and I was overwhelmed with the number of people who thought that I should keep blogging. In all honesty, the blogging does take a lot longer than the training ever took, but now that I'm no longer training per se, I may limit the blogging as well, and try to find some happy balance. So, you've basically all been thinking that I've been a quitter, haven't you? It's a fair point. I haven't been running since the half marathon on 9th October. Until yesterday.

There were reasons why it took so long, however, which were beyond sheer laziness. Remember the whole "being ill" thing I had going on around the race? Amazingly, the running with a virus neither killed me, nor made me feel any worse than I expected to feel at that point of an illness. In all honesty, if anything, I felt better. Notwithstanding this, however, I did progress on, as one does so often, into a chesty cough. And frankly, I felt that an athlete deserves a break after a race, so the two things coincided nicely.
Yes, folks, yesterday I got the trainers on again. I primed Running Dave the day before, knowing that I'm a good runner but pretty useless in terms of going by myself. Interestingly, I gave the garmin back, so I was technology-free. This was disconcerting, so I had to get updates from Dave on our speed. We ran around the rowing lake, which is 5.5 miles, and ran a good speed of 9:30 minute-miles. This is actually faster than I ran my 10k race, and almost the same distance. No wonder my lungs were hurting. Dave is back in training (although in fairness, he wasn't really "in" training for the half marathon) for the Hereward Relay Race, which goes from Peterborough to Ely. He's got to run a leg of 7 miles, so he's keen to keep up a good speed. They also have Tim who is a very fast runner, Sal, and moustachioed Chris.

My running gear caused something of a frisson among the running community in the office. "Oh, are you keeping it up?" people generally wanted to know. The non-runners (well, Richard) asked if I usually wore those clothes in the office, an equally rhetorical question, I presumed. I explained that I was waiting for the shower to be free. Sal wanted to know if I was going in for the London Marathon, so I filled her in on the thinking around this to date. Oh go on then, as long as you're here.

I emailed Arthritis Research UK to ask if they had a charity place, so I could run for my mum, who has Polymyalgia Rheumatica, and who gave me such a fearsome glare when I told her I was running the half for someone else's mother. They ask you to raise £1800 to take part. Then I found out while on a Finance for Charities course that technically speaking, if a charity says you can't compete unless you raise the money they have asked for, that it ceases to be a donation and you can only claim gift-aid on donations. They were pretty blase about it, and said that the Inland Revenue are aware of this, and frankly have better things to do, but I'm kind of anal in a law-abiding way, and don't want the IR to have anything to stick on me. This put me off the whole idea of running in a charity place. If you get a place yourself, you can obviously still donate to charity, and then you don't have an additional stress of trying to raise a set target. There are other marathons... Brighton, Edinburgh...

I also had the ridiculous notion placed before me to run the Norway Half Marathon, which excited me because it is so insane, and also because you might get to see the Northern Lights, which would be magic. I'd think of it less as a race and more as a survival exercise to brag to other runners about. I certainly wouldn't be overly concerned about my time, for example. It was Summer who suggested this lunacy, but then backed out and said that unfortunately she had reckoned without her family's travel plans. She is still hopeful for another year though. Incidentally, if you don't know where Tromso is, it is here.

Paul overheard my discussions with Sal, and and immediately suggested three races (only one of which Sal had already got in) which were a 15km, a 20km and a possible 20 miles, depending on which marathon I plumbed for. There seems to be a general acceptance of the fact that as I like racing, clearly entering races is the way to keep me motivated. Dave suggested that I talk Sal out of her place in the relay. I hadn't intended on doign this, as it seems to me that fair's fair - she got in first. However, it came up in conversation anyway. "Why aren't you doing the Hereward Relay?" Sal demanded. "Um. Well, there's four places..." I said. "Have mine! You should run it. Go on. Just do it" She said. I panicked a bit: "But that's only three weeks away". We've kind of left it hanging...