Back In The Old Routine (again)

Well, weren’t the six months since I last added to this blog a load of fun? Er, perhaps for some of you, but for me, in retrospect, not always.

I left you as I was beginning what became three months of a twice-daily exercise routine aimed at rehabbing my damaged achilles tendons. For the first six weeks, it was just a chore, used as an opportunity to listen to music, or watch a bit of tv while I counted off the exercise repetitions. Things changed at the point that the exercise schedule moved from requiring me to do the heel-drops with just my bodyweight, to asking me to do them wearing a weighted rucksack. In went four 5kg weights to an old but robust bag, and the “fun” continued. Only now I began to realise that the previous weeks of boredom and toil really had strengthened my lower legs. Coupled with two hard session every week on my Wattbike trainer (because I was assured cycling like that was not going to make my achilles tendons worse, and the sessions were great cardio-vascular work), I was tentatively maintaining fitness and not making aggravating my achilles injuries.

The routine ended just after New Year, and very slowly, I started jogging again. I was under very strict orders not to run uphill, but there was no ban on running downhill, within reason. I’d been walking round the course of the new-ish local park run we’d joined, for a little while, as much as anything to give me some fresh air, and that gave be a basis from which to progress. 

The Mote Park parkrun course has a certain reputation for hilly-ness. The start of it is around 800 metres in a straight line, 600 of which are uphill. The remainder of that 800 comprises two short downhill bits. After that, it undulates either side of three ascents and descents of the opening hill all done from its other side. I felt rather conspicuous to be walking those uphills, but there was a delightful release in being able to run downhill between them. This mixture gave me a very decent interval training routine. The parkrun course starts and ends at the same spot, so topography being the precise science it is, meant that I had an equal distance of uphill and downhill to do, overall. The return to the finish was a delight. It was like getting my revenge on the hills I was obliged to walk up at the start of the run. Save for two short uphills, I could stretch out and run as hard as any sprinter can with four kilometres already covered. Hmm. Shall we say, I don’t recall being overtaken on that finishing stretch, and I did my fair share of overtaking others, usually culminating in a final 200 metres as hard as my legs and lungs could still cope with. Lots of visualisation going on at that point too.

My 5km time for the completed parkrun was never going to be anything to write home about, but it was achieved with lots of walking uphill, remember. Just occasionally, to give some variety or to avoid aggravating a leg twinge, real or imagined, I would walk the whole of the 5km. Twice I did this while walking as hard as I could, and established (and subsequently broke) an alternative parkrun personal best, achieved with no running at all. And at the point of writing this episode, those kinds of fun and games continue on most Saturday mornings.

However, now, I have something else to motivate me. The parkrun stuff is, of course, a means to an end for me. I was going to say “just a means to an end”, but that would sound like an unkind slur on the excellent institution that is parkrun. However, as someone once said, “Who wants to live in an institution?” Getting fit and well again for me means getting back on the track and sprinting. It’s what I’m made for, and what I think I will always do. And, with the exception of the ultimately achilles tendon-wrecking experiences of last August (see last chapter of this blog), it is something that I have been unable to do since July 2019. That’s almost 4 years in exile, and it had to come to an end.

I looked at the fixtures calendar, and weighed up the pros and cons of several of the indoor track fixtures in February. The pros and cons included the likely quality and quantity of the opposition. I was prepared to get beaten – indeed I fully expected to be, after four years, but I drew the line at getting thrashed. Eventually I settled on the Southern Counties Masters Championships, at the newly resurfaced Lee Valley Indoor Arena.

Now, if this blog has taught me anything at all over the years I’ve been writing it, it is the truth of the old adage that “pride comes before a fall”. Therefore, let us suffice it to say that the day I spent feeding the athlete in me on 12 February was, in turn, delightful, worrying, exhilarating, exhausting, and eventually rewarding. I came home with one gold medal and one silver medal, plus a new age-group record for my club at 60 metres.

With a long way still to go, that’ll do for me at the moment!

See you next time.