It’s been a busy few days, what with work and with fitting in the training regime around it.
Today I rearranged my day off, and I’m glad I did. Having been up before day break for the last 4 days I ended up sleeping in until lunchtime today – over 11.5 hours in bed which is a huge amount by my 8-hours standard!
Having seen the weather was set to be better today than tomorrow, I decided the interval training could wait for a gym day before work tomorrow and I’d get out and pound some tarmac in the dry today. It felt really hard work today. I’m not sure if I’m coming down with something, whether it was down to my meal of rubbish food yesterday or just because I’m doing a lot of exercise and my body hasn’t quite caught up with it.
8.3 miles in an hour isn’t brilliant, but it’s a lot better than the run actually felt.
I got back home and sync’d my Nike+ watch so all the data could be fed into the online websites. I realised on Strava that one can input actual personal best times and when looking online to confirm my Marathon time of 2012 discovered a horde of photos from the event that I hadn’t seen before by Ian Thraves.
No pictures of anyone I knew but it caught the atmosphere very well and brought back some strong emotions. The weather was so bad that looking at the state of the runners finishing, it was reminiscent of some of the photos that are shown following a disaster / appeal for help! Plenty of tears at the end of people’s own races (I remember feeling almost deliriously happy and I think that was the hypothermia kicking in).
It had me remembering finding somewhere warm enough to ring Mark to find out where he was waiting for me and then me waiting in the refreshments tent along with a number of other runners around a radiator trying to get our core temperature back within a safe distance of normal (I’m not exaggerating for effect, people were really quite unwell) whilst another friend came to find me.
Whilst looking at the photos above, I saw one with a runner wearing a t-shirt with a photo of a person who had passed away recently and I presume the reason why they were running to raise money for. I hadn’t expected any of this really to affect me, but for the first time in a few months the tears were flooding out of me. I’ve not a clue why the reaction was so strong, but maybe it was triggering a flashback to a time not long before Mark passed away.
Sometimes these things just catch you and release all the emotions. That’s love. 🙂 Thanks so much for sharing that.