Challenge

I had a bit of a hiatus after the Hastings Half. I guess a week off is understandable, even if you don't FEEL damaged, a few days' recovery is going to be advisable. The second week was me being lazy. Or enjoying it. Week three I started coming down with something. By Thursday, I was getting kind of croaky. Rehearsals are interesting when you can't project, but Peter had been in the same boat a week earlier (I can't think where I might have picked it up from). He advised me to go straight to the doctor's, as he had been put on antibiotics. I replied that there wasn't any point, as what i had was clearly viral. "No, the doctor started writing the prescription before I'd finished telling him the symptoms" he said, almost boastfully. I resisted the temptation to reply that his doctor should clearly be struck off, if he'd prescribed antibiotics without first taking his temperature and looking down his throat. But hey ho. It probably would have happened anyway, without the additional talking at rehearsal, but either way, the next day, I was totally mute. Whisper only. However, I still felt fine, and clearly wasn't running a temperature, so I went ahead and went into work anyway. Viruses are for sharing, right? Also, this was vastly entertaining for my colleagues, the majority of whom did not lose the opportunity to observe how peaceful it was in the office, and how hilarious it was listening to me in whispered conference with my colleague, Chris. By the time I went to the pub, my humourous colleagues had created my very own iPad for me, which was in fact, a pad. They indulged in writing entertaining flash-cards (none of which included "Yeah but no but yeah but no" thankfully), and I added my own, an explanatory "I've been putting up with this bollocks all day" which proved quite useful, and in fact, has ongoing applications.

The voice stayed away for the whole weekend, but by Monday I was able to speak softly, allowing for the fact that it occasionally broke mid-sentence, like a prepubescent boy. That was OK, I was at a conference (not giving a paper) and it elicited much more sympathy than I'd got the previous week. I still didn't feel a lot like going running, though, as I'd now developed an unhealthy cough, in addition to being heinously busy, with a three day course from Friday to Sunday, at the end of the week.

But you can't just give up for ever, waiting for a husky voice and a cough to disappear altogether. I recalled moustachioed Chris saying that he tended to go with overall health vs grottiness, and didn't pay too much mind to malingering symptoms. So at some point, I was going to have to think of training for my next challenge. Well, Dave thought I ought to do a bunch of 10k races this year. I don't mind... that's kind of manageable, and I think it will help me to get faster. This can only be good because if you can run faster, you'll be done sooner, that's the way I see it. Only, I still have the transport issue. Usually have to rock up somewhere on a Sunday morning at 9 or 10, and I don't have a car. So, any kind offers of dual support-and-transport, I accept.

Anyway, in the interim, up comes Sally's challenge. Run 5km or 10km every day in May. To be honest, I'd been aware of this challenge for some time, but I really do struggle to find the time to do training 2-4 times a week anyway, and what with being ill, I thought I'd give it a miss, and vicariously live it through her Facebook page, Fit Naturally. Now, for those of us who work in miles (this includes Sally, in fact: when I started training with her, she asked me to switch Runkeeper over from km to miles), 5k is 3.13 miles. So I guess 10k is 6.26 (I'm good). So I was thinking, maybe, 5k won't take too long, even on a busy day. It'd usually take me just under 30 minutes to run that distance. And I guess there's no rules to say I can't run extra if I feel like it. So there's me, leaning towards doing it, but still feeling grotty.

There was another agenda behind this. I'm rehearsing for The Tempest at the moment, I'm playing Ariel. I found out a couple of months ago that my costume is a skin-tight silver catsuit. So I have every reason to do all I can to get into, and stay in, shape until the end of June. I also thought that these new-trend "bare foot trainers" would look great on Ariel for the costume, and they are supposed to be excellent for runners too. So in the back of my head, I also thought it might be a good part of my challenge to run in them. And, they arrived the day before 1 May. How fated was that? I figured that a 3.13 mile start was a short enough distance to (cautiously) give the bare feet a go.

OK, so ideally, they'd have arrived a month earlier, so I could have got used to them first, but you know. I wasn't even dead sure I was going in for the challenge until I came back from rehearsal at 10, and then I thought, come on, it's now or never. So I did it.