02 June 2015

#Juneathon Day 1 - the story so far ...

What a way to start Juneathon! I'm physically really tired but to explain I'll rewind a little ...

For those who don't know (I'm using the plural here so I'm being optimistic that more than one person will read this) I ran the London Marathon this year.  It was a little last minute as Asthma UK contacted me the Wednesday evening before the last charity entries had to be entered on the Friday to ask me if I'd consider running for them as they'd lost some runners (must have been a particularly long and difficult training run). 

It just so happened that I had been training for the Great Welsh Marathon so I felt I'd be okay training wise but I still had to do some fund raising. However, I had had an asthma attack at Christmas (my first and hopefully last) and it really brought home what a lot of what more severe asthmatics had to deal with all the time - so I agree. Well London Marathon all went well, I didn't get sub 4 hours but I did know 8 minutes of my PB and came in at 4 hours 2.5 minutes :-)

This must of induced a slight loss of sanity as I then decided to enter myself for an ultra! I looked around and decided to enter the Race to the Stones event, a 100km run across the Ridgeway ending at Avebury Stones - 1km for each year that my wife and I have been around I said, sigh! Now I have to do the training but, BUT I seemed to have acquired ITBS since the London Marathon, sigh (again).  So my long runs become a little bit painful, ouch (after about 16 miles). But the ultra is only on the 11th July, gasp (panic).  So I've developed a random pin ball approach to my training where I try to do my longest run, skip the back-to-back run (too much pain) and then do a lot of tiring stuff to compensate, wait for the ITBS pain to subside, go to my physio for encouragement (and different pain) and then run another even longer run hoping to do a back-to-back and then not doing it.  

So I did a long run on Friday night of 24 miles, did a pain induced skip of the back-to-back run on Saturday, compensated by tiring myself out dancing at a wedding on Saturday night (great wedding it was), tired out on Sunday and then it was Juneathon!

It was Juneathon AND I have some new Hoka super padded trail shoes that I believe (a lot of faith here) will help me with my ITBS.  So I took my brand new Hokas and my almost 9 year old collie (see below for a picture of him) out IN THE RAIN last night and (with aching legs) went for a run across the fields, in the wind for a whole 5 miles, it was dark too, and thus completed the beginning of the Juneathon slog - thanks Cathy. Here we go again, a month of relentless exercise and the promise of an ultra soon after :-s

I must add that my good wife is also endeavoring to do Juneathon but without the blogging (I have to do it instead), so for the record she did Zumba last night.

I have no time to edit this so it's getting posted with no checks, sorry!

My Juneathon total is 5 miles 

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