Life

We all have good years and bad years. Good months, bad months. Down to good days, bad days. And when you've run for years on end, and then returned from the dark side and started running again, life tries to drag you back to the days of sitting on the couch, knowing every actor's name in every sitcom, and every single thing that is on television. Or for that matter, the internet.

Since I've started running again last year, I've become injured, had an incident with cows, a snake and a few bugs that felt that I was threatening their very existence. I got a recurrence of glandular fever. I became incredibly busy at work. And after all of that, I was still running. Life didn't get me down.

Until three weeks ago. I decided to call in the help of a professional to keep me on track. That's right. I got a coach. At first I thought it would only be to help me on my bike, but after a lot of chatting and realising that he helped a lot of people get to the finish line for their first Ironman, I decided to let all of my training needs with him.

So far he's made me incredibly tired, but I feel better about my training than I have in literally ages.

So tonight I was pondering all of the above and thinking about the days ahead. All this while I was on my run that was supposed to last for 60 minutes. I decided at the beginning of my run that I was going to look at my watch as little as possible. The first time I looked at it was at the top of a hill, a spot that I know is 1 mile into my run.

I then drifted back into thought for a while and just let it go. Minute after minute after minute passed.

When I came back from the land of many thoughts and ideas, I decided to have a look at my watch and I'm sure my heartrate instantaneously went sky high. I would be able to tell you how high, if only it wasn't that my watch had stopped at 1 mile - the last time I looked at it - and it was showing me a lovely 1.61km on the screen.

At first I thought I was going to scream. I had no idea how far I had run or for that matter, how long.

So very calmly, I figured that my body would know when I had run for an hour and I continued. When I stopped I reset my watch and started it again, as it logs the start time of each run. When I got home, I realised I had run a full 1 hour and 1 minute :) I'm more than happy.

Afterwards I went to measured the course, and although I only ran 8.8km, I'm quite happy with it for the time being. It will improve with time :)