A trip to the sunny side

This weekend was going to be my 10th marathon, a lovely trip to Limassol - they keep telling me it’s fast and flat, oh and sunny! Which is great. Except it won’t be my 10th marathon. It will still be flat and I hope it will still be sunny, but for the second time in a year I’ve dropped down to half marathon distance. I suppose it’s better than it becoming my 3rd DNS or even my first ever DNF. But I still feel disappointed. Mostly in myself. 

 

Everyone says ‘it’s the right thing to do’ or ‘well done for recognising it’ - but actually if I could have motivated myself to just do a few more training runs then I wouldn’t have found myself here. It was all starting to look good. January and February I was running, Ashford 10k became the first run I did without any walking and then, well then I don’t know what happened. I just stopped again. Technically I was still doing my long runs and if I’d completed my 20 miler in Thanet then I suspect I’d be flying off to Cyprus to run a marathon. But the race was cancelled due to snow, so I lost the enforced test of race conditions and 20 miles. Either way it would have told me if I was marathon ready. But now I’ve just sort of opted out, without really knowing if it was the right thing to do. 

Listen to my head is how I’ve put it. Well that’s actually quite a dangerous thing as frankly lately my head tells me a whole load of crap. Recognising what is actually worth listening to is a skill I’m not exactly mastering. We don’t like to disappoint ourselves and I don’t like to disappoint others. I know, I know - I’m not disappointing anyone, but hell I’ve been going on and on about this bloody race so it feels like somehow I am. Like the judges of social media will bang their invisible gavel and declare me guilty of over reacting, under performing and generally being an arse.....

See I told you I shouldn’t listen to my head! 

The good news is I have lots of races still to come, I’m determined to actually run Salisbury Marathon this year (the first race I dropped out of last year) and Loch Ness in September, oh and the little matter of 52 miles worth of Race to the Tower in June. If I keep telling myself all of that means it’s okay to just kick back, fly to Cyprus, drink cocktails and still run 13.2 miles (without any more than run one per week in months) and actually not only is that okay, it’s amazing. If I keep telling myself that....

I don’t want to find myself quoting Ronan Keating, as then I’ll know I’ve seriously hit rock bottom - yet life IS a rollercoaster. I no longer want to get off, but at times I feel quite a bit sick and I’ve never been a fan of rollercoasters. Turning upside down sucks. I like to stay steady and know where I’m going. I like it’s a small world - annoying song and all. There would have been quite a thrill trying to see if I could run the marathon on Sunday, instead I’m in going to float round the course in my little boat waving at small people. 

Then maybe once all this is over and I come back and start actually training I can go back to writing blogs which make sense....I’ll take bets on that if you like 😉