Back Tracking

The injury to the back after paddling with the raised and canted seat has made paddling impossible for the last week or more. While it's okay to move around and walk the problem with sitting and raising myself from a chair to a standing position has been less than happy. It took a week for sufficient mobility to be mustered to get around in an approximately 'normal' fashion, but paddling was still out of the question. This wouldn't have been so bad but the Pangbourne Hasler, which I was looking forward to entering and the new season of Club Hare & Hounds looms in a weeks time. I'm afraid there's no possibility of taking part in the  Hasler and the H&H is looking distinctly iffy.

After a week without any exercise to speak of, I felt sufficiently motivated to see if the muscles in question would stand up to a bit of a jog even if they couldn't manage to keep me upright in a  boat for a paddle. In fact, I haven't actually jogged or run anywhere since February, and have as a result found myself getting out of breath during the ever increasingly strenuous interval sessions in the boat. Something which didn't normally happen when I was doing a jog session alongside the paddling. It was inevitable that I would have to return to a jogging session to compliment the paddling sooner or later, so this seemed as good a time as any to experiment and see if my various bits and pieces would stand up to the challenge.

I returned to my earlier stomping ground at Bushy park with the intention of doing the ParkRun course with the first half of each mile walked and the second half jogged. It is conveniently situated so that if things became a bit too hurty early on, the option to retire at about one and a half miles exists without having to walk too far back to the car park. As it happens the suspect muscles complained a bit at first, but by the mile mark were settling down to a reasonably pain free existence. At the finish I'd completed a reasonably steady, if slow, jog/walk in just under 36:00 minutes.

It was sufficient to encourage contemplating taking on the following Saturday's ParkRun for the first time in months. My last Parkrun at Richmond was done in 26:37 a fairly average time but one I knew that if I tried to chase six months later, I would regret. I positioned myself well to the back of the mob at the start and from the go held a fairly steady jog while being hemmed in by countless bodies around me. 

This helped to keep the urge to speed up, er... down, and it wasn't until about two miles that the crush around me began to thin out enough to start to pass a few others. Really, once I'd accepted that it wasn't going to be competitive, it was quite a pleasant and enjoyable outing and I cruised in only slightly out of breath at 29:55. The nice thing about it was that there were no repercussions with the dodgy muscles. In fact the exercise seems to have worked the muscles sufficiently to have eased the problem.

All I have to do now is to carry this over to the boat and catch up the missing time.