Only just recovered

I'll be honest with you, I love running on the whole, but I wasn't really looking to last Saturday or Sunday.

In the previous week, I had a taster session with a personal trainer at DW Fitness Wigan. The session with Matt was hard work, painful, sweaty and brilliant. I really enjoyed it, but was already starting to regret it by lunchtime on Wednesday, but Friday morning, my legs were in agony, my waist was aching and I was struggling to grip anything due to the pain in my hands. (yes, you read that right, my hands)

So it was with trepidation that I eased myself out of my car, On parkrunday, and ambled down to the start line. I was back at home in Heaton Park with my parkrun family after a few weeks of tourism with Team Armstrong (To come in a post soon) for a gentle jog. Graham, Laura and Karl were in attendance joined by Myself, Lauren and Lauren's cousin Meaghan. Sally and Matt were AWOL.

The weather behaved and I finished in just a touch under 35 minutes as I took it easy. Karl is coming back from an injury and Saturday was his first non treadmill run, I was proud to watch him cross the line in a decent time, OK he was in front of me.

The other reason for taking it easy on Saturday was that Laura and I were running the Chester Half Marathon on the Sunday morning and to be quite honest, I wasn't looking forward to it ... in fact I was pretty worried.

In September I ran the Great North Run and did a fair amount of training for it. I coped pretty well and managed to finish in 2:36. For this Half Marathon, I hurt my back in early April and I hadn't managed to prepare very well, in fact the last time I'd run more than 10k was back in early February, so whilst I felt like I could finish Chester, I wasn't 100% that I would, and I certainly wasn't expecting a decent time. anytime under 3:00 was a win.

Getting up at 05:45 on a Sunday morning is just wrong, getting in the car by 06:25 is bad and picking up Laura at 07:00 is just antisocial, doing all three is an affront to anyone who just wants to be lazy. However, we rolled onto Chester Racecourse about 08:15 and by 08:55 we were stood on the start line.

Well, I say the start line, we were back in the Over 02:30 section at the back, it took us almost 7 minutes to reach the start line.

I won't say too much about my own race, I was under prepared and understandably didn't cope too well with the course, however, it was a great event, lots of people out on the course to support the runners, great camerarderie between the participants and the weather was about right being slightly overcast and not too rainy.

I finished in 2:41. If you'd have offered me that before the race, I'd have ripped your arm off. I didn't enjoy this half as much as the Great North Run, probably due to the lack of Prep and less support out on the course. I'm considering sticking to 10k as a maximum from now on.

Laura managed a great time of 2:22, I was really proud of her.

I'm obviously a runner now though because by Tuesday morning my legs were recovered.

This week, Burnley parkrun.

 

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