I seem to have spent quite a few weeks on a “one step forward, two steps back” trajectory. I’m trying to get back to 10k and on 2 December I managed 9k and it seemed within reach. Since then I’ve had a stinking cold (not COVID though) and I’ve only done two runs in nearly three weeks. I started to feel I was losing it and that all my fitness was just going down the drain. It’s coming up to three years since I started couch to 5k and I have a horror of getting so unfit that I have to start again. Not sure I’d have the willpower to put myself through it if I was as terribly unfit as when I did it the first time !
So this morning I decided I could breathe again and I really had to run before descending into the excess of Christmas in case I felt I could never run again. I put my running kit on when I got up, spent a couple of hours faffing about on domestic things and then out I went. I was going to walk/run if I needed to but I was going to do 5k in some fashion or another.
And it was fine, better than fine. I was slow as slow can be (49 minutes for 5k which even for a snail like me is a crawl) but I ran it all. I poddled along, watching the birds flitting in and out of the hedges, feeling my legs happily trundling along. My breathing was easy and I just felt at home somehow. I’m a bit inclined to record everything, to follow training programmes and to compare my performances all the time (only with myself, no point in comparing with other people because I’m always slow as slow) but it was just lovely simply to be out there, running for the pleasure of it. It made me realise that at 67, a stone overweight and with a weakness for a glass of wine and some cheese and biscuits, I am still, astonishingly, a runner. It seems to have become just something that I do. That might be my last run now until after Christmas but I feel I’m ending the running year smiling.