December took 2016 out with a bit of a wimper as far as I was concerned. The Saturday ParkRun at Richmond that followed Friday's practice jog went more or less as expected. Legs still felt tired and stiff so although I made sure of an extended warm up and stretching the best I could manage was a rather slow, but more even paced, jog around the course. The second and third miles went better than I'd dared hope and resulted in an overall time of 27:33 with splits of 1) 8:26. 2) 8:55. 3) 9:12.
The following week it was Thursday before I could get out to Bushy for a session splitting the PR course miles to half and half slow/fast. After four days since the previous run it should have gone fairly well and to an extent it did except for being rather slow. The splits were 1) 4:32/4:11. 2) 4:20/4:24. 3) 4:35/4:26. The following day I went down with Manflu which may have gone some way to have contributed to the poor times. That more or less took me out for the rest of the week and with Christmas away from home there was no further activity on my part for almost the remainder of the year.
The brightest point in the fitness stakes came on the 22nd getting the shoulder signed off by the surgeon. So that's okay then, with only a set of muscles that have little strength and ache after any given amount of exercise. On New Years Eve I toasted the fact that it has now been just a year since the original injury and it's taken that amount of time to get back to a semi recovered position. I really don't know what I'd have done without the jogging/ParkRun to have fallen back on. Without it I wouldn't have retained even the modicum of fitness that remains at the moment. As far as paddling is concerned, that seems just as far away as ever and it's going to take another year to get back to the level I was at a year ago, that's if I can be arsed to bother any longer.
Between Christmas and New Year, Richmond and Bushy ParkRuns provided no fewer than eight (count them) runs. A stirling effort on the part of the organisers and volunteers alike. By my count it might just have been possible to have done six of them due to the delayed timing on the new year eve events. I managed one of them. Full of plum duff on the 31st after a near two week layoff from everything, I staggered around Richmond for the last time that year to put in my 49th run. It didn't go particularly badly except for losing the inevitable 20 seconds to the start and to add insult to injury being elbowed out of two places by a pair of 'laydees' who ignored etiquette and passed me in the funnel to take my position number and cost me five seconds on my official time. Bless! Splits for that PR were:- 1) 8:26. 2) 9:06. 3) 9:51.
I had planned another excursion try out in a kayak at the club today but on getting up the weather was rather worse than predicted with a heavy frost over everything and the garden pond frozen over with ice thicker than I could easily break. Previous experience shows that that means the canal at the club would be frozen over making the forty mile round trip a bit pointless. So I shook that one off for another day and went for a jog instead.
Just one short of the first club tee shirt award at fifty runs I'm planning on engaging with that one this coming Saturday. There's not enough time to build up a reasonable head of steam for an attempt at a PB but I've today managed a halfway decent jog through the centre of Richmond park and finishing up pushing hard through the last mile (hilly) section. I plan on another interval session at the local rec on Thursday. All of which might just give me a respectable time for the 50.
So, there we go. Still no plan for the future, but there's still another Fifteen months to the next available DW. Who knows
No comments:
Post a Comment