It’s been a week since last my run. It was a club run but it was so bad I won’t dignify it with an entry, suffice to say it was the first time I’ve ever had to abort a club session and be accompanied by an entourage to take me back to base.
It wasn’t that I physically couldn’t run, but my recent issues of having numbness and tingling down my left side of the body simultaneously reared it’s ugly head again after roughly a mile. I had to stop.
As a result I’ve stopped just short of actually being scared to run but I have been very, very hesitant to try it again. I wanted to wait until I’ve had a few days clear of the ‘funny turns’ I’ve been having before attempting it so, encouraged by a weekend free of them, I decided to venture out tonight.
Working on the theory that I wanted to retrain my body again and build things back up in a structured, disciplined manner I’ve opted to fast track myself back through Couch to 5K. I’ve done C25K so many times now and, obviously, I don’t need to worry about the actual running part of it but it provides a handy ready made plan to gradually reintroduce exercise etc. back into my system given that I haven’t a clue what has been causing things to happen lately. I may or may not ‘complete’ the C25K but I’ll keep going until I feel comfortable within myself again.
As I said, I was going to fast track myself through C25K so I had intended to do the entire first week in one go tonight, in other words run/walk in two minute intervals nine times which would have given me 36 minutes on my feet. Again, compared to what I’m used to, that is nothing but I wanted to be gentle on my body, at least initially.
That was the plan when I went out around 9pm … only I hadn’t bargained on it being December! It tends to get quite slippy!!! I realised this fairly quickly so elected, instead, to just do ‘day one’ which was a very basic two minutes run/walk x3.
But to make it slightly interesting I thought I’d do it around the playing fields beside my house in the pitch dark … well, not quite, because I had bought myself a head torch today so this was the perfect opportunity to try it out. No floodlights, not even any street lights, this was total darkness but I found it quite liberating to be out there on my own with just my head torch for company. That was, until, some bloke came past me on his bike and scared the bejaysus out of me!!!!
The run itself was fine. The running segments were over very quickly, whereas the walking seemed to drag. My running pace seemed ok, too, as were my legs so as first tentative steps back went it was a success.
I’m also writing this a couple of hours later and, so far, I’ve suffered no ill effects elsewhere in my body so, hopefully, things are looking up.
HUFF, PUFF AND SHUFFLE 