Burning Japanese (food)

This evening, I was stumbling up the last of the upwards hilly bit in the middle of my circuit with a stitch developing, feeling bloated and The Vapours classic “Turning Japanese” tune in my head, threatening to drown out Phedippidations, and Steve's praise of Burning 20, the title of this entry just came to me. Which is good as for various reasons, I've had a bit of bloggers block since my last entry.

Sunday just gone was our wedding anniversary. So I'd spent a few hours with the kids back in the Wyre Forrest, having a picnic and an hour's biking through the trees, giving D a few hours peace and quiet, before returning for the England vs Ecuador match at 4pm local time. (Sorry, no countryside photos this time!). A lot of things were riding on this match, but most important was whether D would be happy or miserable in the restaurant later on.

Thankfully, the result was a happy one. So we headed off joyously to a virtually empty Japanese restaurant, Wagamama, in Birmingham. We ate lots. It's hard not too as the food is just delicious and the service lightning fast. But all day today, I've just felt bloated. And even though I didn't feel like it, I dragged myself out the door into the evening drizzle to burn off miso ramen, yaki soba and plenty of gyoza, while sane people watched Switzerland Vs Ukraine.

Now, between my last post and this have been 3 runs. Thursday and Friday, both at 4:1 run:walk and this evening up to 5:1. Friday was strange, as I had a sudden urge to run, even though I normally keep (at least) one rest day between runs. So I just went with it and there were no problems. I was a bit concerned this evening that the biking yesterday might have strained something, but again – aside from a bit of stitch, no problems.

So it's all still going well. I've even started looking at the Phedippidations half marathon training programme, but that's too optimistic. Surely?

Mr Stumble

Stats, Shirts, Rabbits and Batteries.

I thought it might be interesting to get an idea of just how few people are reading, seeing as blogger doesn't have any good in-built stats and I'm just a bit curious. So, after a short Google and some not-too-difficult work, I got Site Meter attached to the end of my blog pages (you'll see it right at the bottom of the page) and left it to sniff out who's reading and how often.

So, I'm sorry if you feel this is an intrusion, I hope you understand!

Turns out that there are 4 people, not including me, looking at my paltry efforts at the moment. And given a single mention on FDip and a couple of links from at least 2 other blogs, I think that's not bad. But I am easy to please!

You can see the stats for yourself by clicking on the sitemeter logo down there..... and if you'd prefer I turn it off, I'll take a straw poll from any comments and do what pleases the audience!

As for running, well, I did my second 3:1 minute run:walk on Tuesday morning, nice and early (but not if I compare to Phil and his 5:30am starts) which was fine. The main change was my new Brooks running shirt which I picked up from a local running store at a vastly discounted rate through a RunnersWorld advert. Funny thing was, it was a "trade in your old cotton Tshirt and buy a Brooks shirt for £10 (normally £15). However, Brooks had totally failed to put all of the Tshirt recycling services in place, and the shop owner didn't want to just take a Tshirt and stick it in the bin. So, I got the discount and kept the Tshirt. It's these minor little bonuses in life which make shopping bearable.

I'm all set for a 4:1 run this evening, which I'll post an update for assuming my haggard old DSL router doesn't pack up again. It's had some power supply problems, brought on by the family rabbit stripping the power cable (12 volt - after the transformer) of insulation during a particularily destructive unattended tour round the back of my PC.

On the plus side, those batteries for Mr Garmin arrived and are busily charging at this very moment.

Mr Stumble

Failure to Stumble

This weekend was the date set for my original target, the Stourbridge Stumble. (BTW, the "Stour" part rhymes with "flower"). Needless to say, I wasn't in any shape ready - I might have made it to the fun run if I'd started off with a good plan, but there you go.

Always pragmatic, and not to be disheartened through aiming too high, my first goal now is to simple run for 30 minutes - without stopping - and to do so comfortably. Pretty reasonable.

The early part of the week saw me increasing to 2 whole minutes of running and 1 minute walking repeated 11 times, and this went pretty well. That elongated "week" is shown below. Mr Garmin is becoming a bit more accurate and consistent in the pace he's recording as the running sections become longer, and keeping him charged up has also helped. Mind you, it shouldn't be long before my new 900mAh rechargeables hit the doormat.

Todays walk in the woods was at Cannock Chase, about a 40 minute car ride from where I live. My daughter has been at a Guide camp this weekend up there, so we went up a couple of hours early with the other two kids and had a walk around Castle Ring and some of the local pathways. Always thinking of you, I took a couple of shots of the green stuff, careful not to include the big coal fired power station totally failing to blend into the local surroundings.



Then, this evening came the time to increase to 3 minutes running and 1 minute walking, 8 repetitions on the normal route. And it went fine. It felt much more like real exercise as this is starting to push at (my pretty low) stamina rather than train muscles to work properly. Total run distance is now about 2.4 miles.

You might note that from my "YATP" post, that I'm not following very much of anything at the moment, other than what feels right. I think that I have the balance OK at the moment between pushing on and avoiding injury. Where I am now, I see one more at 3:1 before I go up to 4:1. We'll see how things go.

In the meantime, I watching out for local 5K races to try out in a month or two, so I have a goal to follow this one.

Mr Stumble

Stalling for time

The real reason I've been dazzling you with photos instead of recording running time is - well - because I managed to sunburn my feet on Sunday. They weren't the only parts sunburnt, but the critical part when it comes to hitting the pavements.

Just wearing socks was uncomfortable and the thought of strapping on those Pearl Izumis was a bit too much. So I delayed till today and after yet another day in The Smoke, but before Lost came on at 10pm (we're somewhat behind the US, still at the Anna Lucia shoots Shannon bit - no spoilers please!!!) I headed out for another 11 reps of 2 running and 1 walking.

Seeing as Brazil and Croatia were kicking a ball round in Germany, the roads were pretty quiet and thankfully, much cooler - we've had a bit of a mini heatwave here, hence the sunburn, which has ended in the traditional manner of a pretty big thunder storm followed by rain, rain rain.

Temperatures over the weekend exceeded 30 Centigrade. This evening a much more pleasant 15 Centigrade. Of course Mr Garmin packed up again after a minute running. It does squawk as it dies to let you know, which is good, otherwise I might not have noticed at the time and run the whole thing (yeah, right). However, I don't think it Mr Garmins fault. It's probably my fault for putting nasty old cheap 600mAh Ni-MH in it and not charging them every other day. I'm about to buy some higher rated premium batteries to sort this out.

With Mr G out of action, fall-back is my Runners-World freebie-with-3-month-subscription-multi-function-rubber-watch. So there's no split times and I ran roughly the same pace overall as on Saturday, just using good old digital stopwatch technology. I was listening to Steve Runner get mad at Muriel Gray for disrespecting Podcasts which I found very funny. I think Steve's dead right, and Gray has spent so much time in old format media that she just doesn't get it.

Go Steve!

Still running through Lactic Acid ache and a lot of tension in my calves – but no ripping thankfully, so the plan is coming together. Unfortunately, I've not managed any cross training on my non-running days, need to do better here. At the moment it looks like one more run at the current splits and then move up another minute of running between walking.

I'm at that stage now I was last Wednesday. Run for 3 minutes – madness! But as I've broken through that psychological barrier once, I know I can just keep doing it by staying focussed and sticking with the plan.

Thanks again for all your support. Of course you know what I'm doing when I distract you with pretty pictures now. Maybe one more for the moment. This one is titled “Hagrid waits for Dinner”




Mr Stumble

Another for arid lands

As Phil liked the last set of pictures, I thought I'd post this one, taken in April 2001 at a beach called Sandy Mouth, near Bude in Cornwall. It was the middle of the Foot and Mouth crisis, and no-one was going anywhere in the UK. Except us, enjoying lovely scenery and brooding weather with no-one else around.

If you visit a UK beach in April, you need a wetsuit to enjoy it, even if it's sunny! Brrrrrrr...

Mr Stumble.

for friends in arid climes

As a supplementary non-running entry, and seeing as “green-ness” of the landscape has been commented on in previous posts, I thought you might like these few photos. Today the family visited a lovely little beach in Wales, belonging to the village of Tresaith.

It was a bit of a trek – 3 hours in the car each way, but well worth it.
Glorious sunshine, sandcastles, sandy sandwiches, frisby, ice-creams and very few people there. Most day visitors to Wales hit the more accessible and commercial areas around New Quay to the North East.



Anyway, Enjoy.

Mr Stumble

Stepping up a gear

This week, in addition to the Monday run, I ran again on Wednesday and Saturday, as Friday became difficult for various reasons. Wednesday was another 11 repetitions of 1 minute running and 90 seconds walking, and I modified the route so that I ran it “backwards”. This was because I thought maybe facing the uphill bit first , then having a downhill middle section followed by a moderate uphill end might be better, as the uphill bits would be in 2 segments.

This turned out not to work too well, and I found the revised route much more difficult. However, I made it round OK with just lactic-acid ache and no strains. Mr Garmin had problems again getting signal lock, so when I post the times, they'll look odd.

When I got to the end, I couldn't imagine being able to step up to running two whole minutes with a minutes rest then repeated for 30 minutes. Madness.

Today's run however, was that step up in running time. I returned to the original basic route, tried to keep the pace down and repeated 11 times: two minutes running, one minute walking. And what I thought was madness on Wednesday turned out to be pretty much achievable. I'm doing 11 repeats because Mr Garmin doesn't count walking as part of the thing it times. You start with a running section and finish with a running section, so it's kind of 10 x (2 +1) +2 = 32 minutes training.

Quadratic equations next week :)

As I've posted before, I actually find the walking sections difficult because it seems to stress the already complaining muscles in a different way, but I'm not going to push the running time up quickly as I know my leg will go again if I do so.

So stepping up a gear has worked OK. I'll stick with 2 more sessions like this one before I increase the running segments to 3 minutes.

Mr Stumble.

Week 1 - extended a bit.

Since my last run on Wednesday, that-old-injury (you must be so tired of me going on about it) has been letting me know it's still there, without actually baring it's teeth. I've been doing a fair bit of walking anyway to try and mildly exercise it which has consisted of tromping round London to get to places where the tube doesn't get very near to, and a pleasant leisurely stroll around a UK beauty spot on Sunday. Dovedale.

Dovedale is about 90 minutes by car from where I live and is somewhere my parents took me and my sibs when we were young-uns, so there's no good reason why I can't inflict it on my 3 kids now.

It's especially nice when there's no too many people there and it being the end of a mid-term break for the UK kids, it was fairly crowded, but once you get past the point where most day trippers stop to splash about and fall off the stepping stones, it becomes a little less like a shopping mall and more like a country walk.

Dovedale is a scenic limestone valley about 3 miles end-to end through which the River Dove flows on it's way to joining the River Manifold. Terrain is mixed, but mainly good paths with a few more difficult rocky sections to carry the youngsters over. You can see some pictures at http://www.cressbrook.co.uk/features/dovepic.htm - I took some of the kids but couldn't find a decent scenic view to snap for you this time.

We walked at mainly 3 year old pace for close to 2 miles along, before turning back, retracing out steps, with the promise of ice-creams keeping the returning pace fairly brisk. Carrying my 3 year old also helped the speed, and she had done really well walking that far anyway. The whole thing with a pleasant picnic in the middle was about 3 hours of early Summer sun.

Not a Grand Canyon hike though, eh Phil! :)

This morning (Monday) I was off tromping round London again and on the rail trip back, I decided that things were probably OK for another run this evening. Just after 9pm, I headed out and really held back on the pace to between 9 and 11 minute mile rates. Unfortunately, Mr Garmin kept loosing signal lock, for no good reason - good view of sky - no clouds, only haze - no trees - so the split time are all over the place, but as I modified the route to make it shorter, I know I was running slower.

And as a result - no pain! And not very out of breath even. My circuit does contain a long slow incline which I find really difficult to walk in running shoes - I feel knotts forming in my legs and running is actually a relief - so I might modify the circuit to something flatter while I work up to 30 minutes.

I think one more of these before I move up to 2 minute running, 1 minute walking.

Mr Stumble.

Week 1 - the never-ending week

Following the jaunt's earlier this week, I've ended up with a mild strain to that calf muscle again. The term "dogged by injury" springs to mind, although cosmically speaking, it's pretty insignificant.

I'm just running too fast. Still. And with it, I've long burnt my chances of hitting my race target. Chances are, I won't even be able to make it round the 4k fun run, my secondary target. The rest of me is itching to move on up to week 2 but I just can't leave my left leg behind!

I couldn't run on Friday as I knew to do so would make things worse and this is very frustrating. I feel that I can't move on through my training plan until I can make it to the end of week 1 without pain. Week 1 will just have to continue until I manage 2 or 3 consecutive runs at a 1 minute run 90 second walk without the wheels coming off, and I manage to keep my pace down to around a 10 minute mile.

In the meantime, it's back to mixing it up with swimming, walking, cycling (if I ever blow those tyres up) and that whole RICE thing Steve Runner talked about in his early shows: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.

Mr Stumble

Week 1 - beginning the plan, proper.

Don't you just hate it when you spend 30 minutes typing in a new blog entry, and then you hit a button to insert a graphic resulting in Blogger vapourising your prose. Gone. And as Tom Hanks put it in You've Got Mail, "I was eloquent, dammit".

New plan for blogging. Write it somewhere else safer. Somewhere that auto-saves the text. Somewhere like OpenOffice. Somewhere not like an IE7beta2 window. I should have known better, especially as it's sort of my job.

I had been banging on about Bank Holidays in the UK. Last weekend was a national holiday, for which the term “Bank Holiday” has become very much part of the language wallpaper. But why the hell are banks anything to do with national holidays in the UK? Wikipedia thinks that it knows, with Bank Holidays being enshrined into UK legislation over 100 years ago, but in the Banking and Financial Dealings act 1871. This kind of thing is just bloody typical in the UK, and to my mind, plain wrong. It's not like I'm unhappy about having a few days off each year, no! It's that we can't be honest about things, and have a separate act for “Banking” and “National Holidays”.

On the other hand, it's this sort of mad quirkiness which makes the UK such an endearing and eccentric place to say you live in. Apparently.

Just don't get me started on the un-written constitution.

Ah, but how does some bizarre decision in 1871 relate to running? Well, Bank Holidays weekends usually mean a day off on Monday. And a lie-in on a Bank Holiday Monday morning is itself a national institution, observed by anyone who doesn't have young kids and who has remained in the country rather than fly out to Malaga or Tenerife. As an exception to the “young kids” rule, my wife usually observes the tradition whilst I feed and entertain my 3 year old daughter until the appointed hour.

This results in no early running. However, lengthening days do allow for running after 9pm without returning in the dark, so this is what I've been doing this week, Monday because of the reasons above, and Wednesday because I had an early train to catch for the Smoke.

Monday went well. I'm still getting used to Mr Garmin abandoning me suddenly when the intervals come to an end – it always seems to start and finish with a “run” interval, when I expected it to finish with a Walk. I've also adjusted the intervals to be 1 minute running, 90 seconds walking as I was finding the 2 minutes between each run a bit boring. This is the run I'm counting as the "start" of the plan, as it's a Monday and matches the training calendar I'm using.

Wednesday was going well until Mr G packed up. As you'll see from the intervals below, it looked like it was having some problems getting a position lock in the 2 intervals before it ran out of juice. I have been toying with lengthening my stride which has resulted in two things.

1) my estimated pace increases to something way too fast and
2) I might have slightly over cooked my calf muscle again. Which went straight back on ice.



We'll see what Friday brings – I might push that run back a day if I've still got some calf pain. And I'll keep an eye on Pace to make sure I don't over do it. I think an 8:40 mile is a comfortable target at the moment, but will probably slow this back as the running intervals become longer.

Mr Stumble.

Run #6 - plan in action

This morning it rained. A lot. It's one of those funny weather weeks here in the UK. Everyone's been waiting for Spring to arrive - Winter has been pretty long this year, not really very cold, just, well long. Now Nature is packing all of April's rain into a couple of weeks in the back-end of May so Summer can get started.

I was ready to hit the pavements this morning if the weatherman had got it all wrong, but also knew that things were slated to improve through the morning and, as I'm working from home today, I could head out at lunchtime.

So this is what I did. At 12:30pm I strapped on Mr. Garmin, hung Mr Brand-New-Delivered-This-Morning-iPod-shuffle round my neck and headed out, kicking off Garmin's Interval Training Assistant. 1 minute running, 2 minutes walking.

It all went pretty well. I heard most of the beeps telling me to start and stop. I was out for just over 30 minutes, I had to tack a bit on the end of the run to get me home. I covered 2.86 miles in total and arrived back feeling pretty good. No pain whilst running, although I did find the walking part strangely difficult as both calf muscles ached - which went away when I ran.

This does seem a bit back-to-front but I suppose it's just my legs complaining that they haven't done this much work in a long time.

Between then and now (12 hours), there've been a couple of twinges, but nothing to make me hobble at all. It's early days but this plan might just work!

Mr Stumble.

Birthday bonanza!

It's been a busy week. Two family birthdays, and one of them - mine! Last year, my birthday was all about sailing, as I'd set a target of learning to sail before year end. So, that birthday was full of wetsuits and sailing books.

By the end of July last year I had completed my 2 sailing courses and passed the RYA (Royal Yachting Association) courses for dinghy sailing 1 & 2 and spent a pleasant Summer crewing and helming Larks and GP14s at our local sailing club.

Sailing year 2 starts to get expensive as you really need to buy a boat. I'm putting this off until next year, due to "exceptional circumstances" and this was one of the contribution factors in looking for, or perhaps being available for alternatives. Like running.

This year, you can guess the gift theme. And I know that non of these things really make that much of a difference, but I just love my gadgets.

First up, the Garmin Forerunner 101. We had a really good deal on this from an Amazon seller and I think this is going to really help me understand how long and far I'll be running, as I'd rather not be measuring miles in my car as time goes on. Mind you, "Map My Run" is pretty good for outline planning.

It's also got some really good interval training function which is just what I need for the old walk/run plan.

Following on from my previous post, I've got an iPod Shuffle on the way too, which will please my daughter as I won't be stealing here MuVo any more.

As to actual training, well I'm really close to restarting the running. I am being pretty cautious - it's now 10 days since I last ran and still had some calf pain then, but in the intervening time I've stayed with the swimming, aiming to keep a steady pace over 30 minutes and build a bit of stamina without the road-impact.

It is 3 weeks ago today that I did the main injury. I suspect, all being well, I'll be back on the pavements tomorrow.

With only 3 weeks to go to my initial target, a 10K is going to be beyond me. However, there is a 4k fun run too ......

Mr Stumble.

Cause and effect.

I was considering the other day the string of events that led to me getting off my backside and trying to get fitter. What can I trace this all back to? Was there a singular event that knocked me onto this new pathway?

As it turns out, it's all the fault of my job. It's probably not a big surprise that I work in the IT sector. It's what makes me blubbersome and slothful. Following what we managed to define as a successful "end" to a particular project (which I'm still working on), a bunch of us were nominated for a little local recognition in a "reward your staff with small consumer gifts rather than manage them properly" sort of initiative. Of course, non of us refused our points based bounty, and I duly headed off for the company reward-partner website and converted points to cold, hard, difficult to spend vouchers; the other stuff on offer was generally pointless or lame.

These vouchers then sat in a desk drawer for weeks until I suddenly had an urge to replace the MP3 capability of my Palm Zire handheld, with a proper music player. One that could store everything I had so I could choose my musical poison on lengthy train rides across the country.

So, an iPod was purchased with said vouchers. A 4th gen 20GB model, easily enough for my very modest collection of music. And just beautiful.

That was all fine until Apple released the iTunes update which included Podcast subscriptions. This really interested me, as up to that point, I'd been pulling BBC content down by FTP every week, stuff like Mark Kermode's film reviews and various other nonsense; occasionally I might have recorded stuff with Audio Recorder Pro from the BBC "listen again" features which meant I actually got to listen to "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" last 2 series and "I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue" at a time that was good for me rather than the broadcast time.

Lots of BBC content was just there for the taking in iTunes. And lots of other stuff too....

So you can probably guess the way this went. Adam Curry's podcast led to Dawn & Drew. Dawn & Drew and Curry led to Phedippidations through Steve's promos and then I heard Steve do Boston 110. From there, I just couldn't help myself. Running is something I've thought about doing for years, including a (not so) secret (now) goal of running a marathon. As the years have gone by, this little life ambition has got a little buried. I've never spoken about it with anyone, except perhaps to D. in an unguarded moment.

So that's how I got here and I hope this story has a happy ending. I'm sure your story is better and I'd like to know how you started, if it's not prying!

Problem I have now is that I need a new MP3 player coz I don't want to mash the iPod disk on a pavement out there. Anyone want to nominate me for an award .........? :)

Mr Stumble.

YATP: Yet another training plan

This is the more intensive hybrid training plan I've come up with as an 8 week "start running" process. I've replaced walking with swimming and cycling as I'm not that much of a walk-around-the-suburbs kind of person. It would be easier if I was in the countryside, but I'm about 15 minutes walk from green-belt here so I'd just see it at the point I needed to turn around!



No doubt, the schedule I eventually follow won't be quite this intensive, but I thought I'd post it up anyway. Someone might use it!

Mr Stumble.

Run #5 - Impetuous, impetuous, impetuous

After all that planning, I couldn't stand it any more and needed to try running again. After some stretching, I could feel nothing wrong with my calf muscle on Sunday evening, so I brought forward the plan to start Monday morning. But a different plan of course.

The walk/run programme was always going to be the way back in but having spent a couple of hours jockeying around runnersworld.co.uk and the coolrunners.com web sites, I decided that their plans were probably pretty good, as they are for beginner runners. Like me. And they were agreeing about how to start, which is based on a 1 minute run and 2 minute walk, repeated 10 times over a 30 minute period. This means 10 minutes of running, rather than the 3 I had actually planned over my first half an hour.

So, back to the drawing board I went and planned out an 8 week training plan based on the runnersworld plan, but using a mix of swimming and cycling as cross training. I'll post it up as I still think its a good plan for someone who hasn't already done some damage.

Anyway, on the 2nd 1 minute run, back comes the twinge and I can feel it pulling again, so I stop and just walk. Walking eases the ache, so I start up again after 2 minutes and it's not so bad. I make a total of 7 walk run cycles, totalling 21 minutes for the whole thing.

Once back inside, I pack my leg with ice and Ibuleve for 15 minutes and see what happens. Well, I've been hobbling again, although no-where near as bad as 10 days ago, so I don't think the damage is too extensive. I think I've proved that I started back too early and should have left it for another couple of days at least. In all, I've probably pushed back the recovery by a week.

It's so hard knowing when an injury is actually fixed, something I think will probably come with experience. But, hopefully you'll understand the need I felt to start pounding the pavement again; I so want this to succeed.

So, it's back to the pool for a few weeks, then I'll try again.

Mr Stumble.

Revised training plan.

This is the revised training plan. It still shows the start day and target days, and where I plan to pick up running, all being well on Thursday 18th May. "@2r8w" means run for 2 minutes and walk for 8 minutes.

This may well mean I'm not in the correct shape for the Stumble by June 17th, but we'll see how things go. I've based this on Phil's advice in his comments to Run #4 - it all seemed pretty damn sensible. I am allowing myself to break some of the rules, like not doing all of the "swim" entries if I think I need a rest day, and if the calf injury threatens again, I'll be backing off a little longer!

Go see Phil in his "Running in the Sun" blog, linked on the right ->

Weight increasing; Sleep decreasing

I thought, as I'm doing this to get in better shape, it might be a good idea to keep tabs on my weight through the programme. Daily weight-taking is not really going to help as micro-increments are not at all inspiring and shortly after my first weigh in, my daughter flooded the bathroom and shorted out the scales.

Having taken the scales apart and fixed them with a blunt instrument, my next weigh in a few days ago gave me a bit of a shock. 3 lb weight gain. Now there were some mitigating factors. I wasn't weighing myself at the normal time, normal being first thing in the morning before I eat anything. It was in the evening after a particularly delicious steak pie - really-calorific-highly-saturated-fatty food and exactly what I should be avoiding. But I was hungry having been swimming the previous day.

And the scales could be lying, having been in pieces not 10 minutes earlier.

However, given that 2 days later, re-weighing showed me 2lbs lighter than this all time high, I think the scales are probably right.

My wife, D, tried to console me by saying that muscle is denser than fat, and that it might be down to a miraculous conversion of blubber to sinew. Pie to blubber is closer to fact.

I had thought that I might just try to keep everything else normal, like diet, whilst I get the basic fitness and stamina bits sorted out, but I don't think that it can work this way. The more effort I put in, the more hungry I'm going to get and the more I need to watch the type of food I ingest.

It's not like I'm a big biscuit (aka cookie across the pond) and chocolate eater. I've still got half of that Toblerone left from Easter. OK, it was a yard long Toblerone, but still that's well less than one chunk every two days. The chunk-rate has been accelerating a bit recently though.

So, on the eats side, we are planning less meat, more fruit, less sweet stuff.

On the sleep side, things have got a bit strange. Fitful is probably the best way of describing it, certainly not proper restive sleep for around half the nights over the past ten days. I'm not sure if this is a result of exercise, work or a touch of a head cold. So, I'll keep an eye on this and see if I can relate it to anything in particular. It might be all the chorine ingested in the local swimming pool keeping me awake.

As for the calf muscle, things have definitely improved. And thanks for all the kind words and wishes attached to previous posts. Just great.

It's not 100% yet and I can still feel the point of injury when I stretch, but just keeping at it with stretching a few times a day and the anti-inflamitory gel have done wonders. All being well I can re-start running later this coming week, with a revised plan.

May get the bike out of the shed in the meantime....

Mr Stumble.

Run #4 - the aftermath

OK. Here's the thing. I've managed to tear my calf muscle - not terribly badly, but enough to make running a bad idea for a few weeks. As we have the NHS (National Health Service) over here and I have a really good local GP practice, I've taken some medical advice on what to do next. And by good, I don't just mean good advice, I mean I call at 9am Monday and have an appointment to attend at 10:30am same day.

So, we assessed the calf muscle for damage. I am able to fully stretch the muscle with only minor discomfort in both directions (toes pointy up and toes pointy down). So it is intact and torn rather than snapped. It is definitely healing, but is likely to take a couple of weeks to get back to a point I can start running again. In the meantime, I don't need any specific physiotherapy; I need to keep *lightly* exercising my leg, especially stretching so that as the muscle re-knits it does so without significant shortening which would reduce flexibility and may lead to future injuries.

This means that the training plan is now out of the window. As Phil pointed out in his comment for "Run #4", it was a bit of a mad plan.

I hadn't considered myself to be desparately unfit and it's probably only natural (for this optimist anyway) to expect to be able to do more. Perhaps I've been kidding myself on the basis that I climb stairs in preference to taking lifts. A couple of sets of stairs a day is not enough! Perhaps my wife is more of a realist than I've given her credit for!

So I'm not going to change the target at the moment (I can always enter the short fun run anyway!), I'll re-assess this in early June. My re-start of running will be when I feel the leg is ready, and this is probably a minimum of a 2 week lay-off from running. The re-start will be to an entirely different plan.

In the meantime, I'm not going to wallow as I can already feel some of the benefits of the exercise coming through, and I need to build stamina and endurance anyway. My local swimming pool opens early and closes late so I've started an interim program of swimming for 30 minutes three times a week, but not pushing it for the moment as this is meant to be the light exercise for my leg, not a session of thrashing up and down the pool and coming out looking like my head's been boiled.

And in any case, even at 9:30 on a Monday evening, my local pool was packed with at least 60 other swimmers, making anything other than a light pace weaving around the supertankers impossible.

I'll post a new plan as soon as I've worked one out, and I'll carry on digging for other runner blogs to see how they're getting on. If you know of one, stick it in the comments and I'll sort out a link in the side bar.

Mr Stumble.

Run #4

This is the last of my 2km scheduled runs before I move up to 3 whole km. Things have not gone to plan though. Just over half way round my left calf went into very painful spasm and I had to stop.

I hobbled back, running about 20 meters before having to walk 100. This is not what I'd hoped! So am now in the midst of some research into pulled calf muscles and am planning a 4 day rest period before I try running again on Monday.

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Mr Stumble.

Run #3

Strangely, I've been looking forward to this run. I know when I'm out there I'll reconsider this position, but simply having this scheduled time to be doing something different makes me feel good.

This is another 6:45 run. Temperature is 6.1 Celsius today and it's overcast with about 10 to 12 knots of blustery wind. No fleece today, although I could do with something long sleeved. Unfortunately I used my last rugby top whilst decorating over the past few months and it's now horribly crusty with paint, wallpaper paste and tile grout. Not something for the outside world to see.

My left calf has been pretty bothersome over the past 2 days. Stairs were a problem for 24 hours after Run #2 and just uncomfortable after that. We took a leisurely 2 mile stroll with some friends at the Wyre Forest yesterday - mainly to exercise the kids - and I think that has helped.

So with some trepidation, and some more stretching and warm up, I kick off run 3. The main question is "how long can I go before my calf seizes up?" Or maybe it's "how do I get back home when it happens?"

As it turns out, although both legs feel a bit tight, it's only the last 200 meters where it really starts to bother me. So overall an improvement. I almost feel that I can push it to run a little further but I'm glad my training schedule allows me one more 2km run before I move to 3km. I think my chest is a bit less full of pond weed now than my first run

The run took 14 minutes without stops - this is analogue watch time not digital - I'm going to need something a bit more accurate soon. The cats out there are starting to recognise me. One big furry black and white moggy actually moved off the pavement as he saw me coming.

Still gave me that same look as I went by though.

Mr. Stumble