Where now?

Saturday last was meant to be ParkRun day but by the time I'd dragged myself out of bed and started moving around in any sort of cohesive fashion, ParkRunners all over the world were enjoying their post run coffee and event post-mortems. My aches and pains associated with both shoulders and wrist had just accumulated to the point that at best I could only expect to manage a pointless trans thirty minute time, which I really don't need at this stage. As it happens I got some sort of justification to my tardy performance as the heavens unleashed their full fury of a downpour exactly as the run began and drenched both Richmond and Bushy events, so at least I was spared that.

All this doesn't look very hopeful for a return to the paddling any time soon. I had supposed that I'd be able to get going again, albeit gently, in the kayak at the twelve week point but the strain in the left hand has put paid to that for the moment. Just to cap that a new and insidious little niggle in the left knee started to make itself felt during the last jog of last week. This week it was back with a vengeance on the first jog and at two miles I was forced to walk for most of the way home, only managing an intermittent jog from time to time. This now makes a full house of injuries, one for each limb. Perhaps life is trying to tell me something.

Actually this latest woe is probably my own stupid fault. A recent story in the press reported that studies had shown that stretching during warm up before a run has no beneficial effect on performance at all. Now I've never been one to spend a lot of time warming up or stretching before a jog when for the most part my first mile is a warm up and a bit of stretching beforehand has sufficed. In deference to the fact that most of my bits and pieces are not so elastic as they used to be, I've lately been quite good by at least paying lip service to some sort of contortion before a jog lasting anything up to a quarter of an hour. But for the last couple I've done precious little by way of stretching before setting off. My experience now shows their theory to be something of a fallacy and I've just paid the price for taking it on trust.

This time last year I wasn't doing too badly jogging around the ParkRun, getting the odd PB and floating a boat in the expectation of taking on a couple of actual races. The boring litany of injuries since then don't bode well for getting back to even that modest standard. So the big question is where to go now? The wrist still isn't up to par and pretty much rules out paddling, while the knee looks as though it's got to take a rest for a while.

There's always aero modelling I  suppose.