February by Jonny Lowes

As I sit here reflecting on the first 2 months of our challenge both January and February were very different, but with notable similarities. Though what the mind is drawn to is not all about the running.

Inevitably the other wonders of that rich & colourful tapestry we call life creep in and either enrich our running experience, or more commonly mess our plans. Our hopes and aspirations meandering right up shit creek, our paddle aloof.

Similarities worth remarking on:

January started and ended in injury

February started and ended in injury

The weather showed consistency, being generally crap with a smattering of terrible

A half marathon in January

A half marathon in February

But if January was  summed up as the month of firsts, then February is a month of broken stuff

A sore shin/calf

My perennially torn hamstring,

A kaputten phone,

A dead laptop

A sat nav that was replaced by Garmin, but the replacement was as much use as the previous one

After running a good Half Marathon PB in my second ever HM and the first of 12 in 2014, I was airing on the side of caution with my recovery time. Racing on the Sunday, wisdom dictates that you should rest for half the days of the miles you’ve just ran. So let’s agree for a HM that should be just shy of a week. So two days later after feeling remarkably well recovered I decided to give harriers a go.

The session that was on offer was the 6x 3mins with 1 min recovery that broke me in December. However, now wise to my previous mistake, I had devised a cunning plan. If I ran the 3 mins slow, this would be a good “active recovery” session.

A consistent theme the keen eyed amongst you may have spotted what I know to be good for me and what I actually do are very different things. After the 3^rd interval, having ran 1.5 miles the mathematicians amongst you will be able to work out that’s 06:00min/miles, which I assure you for me is FLAT OUT. Predictably with the half marathon in my legs the distance I was covering faded but got through the session relatively unscathed. Or so I thought.

The next day I had noticed at work that my calf was sore. On inspection, a bit of pressing and prodding it seemed to be the connective tissue between my calf and the shin. It was sore to the touch, but something I’d experienced before. A week prior to running a PB at the Newcastle Parkrun, I’d tried the Sunderland (BOOOOOO) Parkrun course at Silkworth, with the same pain in my calf/shin. A few days rest and I was right as rain, then I ran a PB the following Saturday.

So the sensible thing was to have some rest. What I did was purchase some Compressport Calf-Guards. Surely spending £26 on some scientific sexy red short tight socks, with their veno-muscular compression technology would stop this from getting worse and enable me to run? Well 4.5miles later I was hobbling round a local route way behind my girlfriend (nothing new there some of you say), I decided the experiment with the expensive and rather fetching compression socks had not been successful.

With another half-marathon to run in 2 weeks I cut my milage back, trying to run a few quick 4 milers and getting out on the bike to keep me ticking over. Frustratingly, I knew this was an over-use injury, which in my experience healed quicker than a rip or a tear, but still needed rest. So after a couple of short runs and now just a week to go I had a decision to make. Should I sack off the 10 mile long-run I had planned and rest up to race day, or run it and hope I’d recovered in time. Surprisingly what I actually did and what I knew to be good for me were the same, I settled on the non-running option, cross-training to keep my fitness levels from dropping too much.

It was hard to take knowing some of the 40 or so mile lead I’d built up over the other lads would be clawed back, but there you go it happens, that’s running. I got to the start of the Liversedge Half Marathon 2014 hoping that not running for 1.5 weeks was the correct strategy.

Race report to follow, at least I knew I’d get there no problem with my replacement sat nav, thanks Garmin........shame I wasn’t able to save all the data from the previous one as my laptop had packed up.