Running
Today’s session was walk 1 minute and run 7.5 minutes 4 times, to give me a total of 30 minutes running, a jump of 5 minutes on 2 days ago.
I very much had to keep the ego in check today and concentrate on keeping to my target pace of 6 min Kms. I finished up with 5Kms of running so the target pace was spot on. What makes me particularly happy, despite the somewhat passive nature of the run, was that it was disgustingly easy. If I was huffing and puffing, sweating and watching the clock desperate for my walk break I’d be pretty depressed because it would truly signal the death of my fitness. On the contrary the pace felt as it should for a runner of my fitness (at least the fitness I had before injury), gentle, relaxed and comfortable, I barely broke a sweat and could have easily talked up a storm, though I forgot to put my heart rate monitor chest strap on.
Although itching to lay on some pace and test myself I was little miss good two shoes and ran nice even Km splits, in fact this could be a good little exercise in learning to pace myself. Any temptation to lay on some speed was quickly quashed with thoughts of having to spend many more months in the pool. Speaking of which I topped up my 10 trip card yesterday, hopefully that will be one of the last times I have to do that, now I will only go to the pool every second day, that is on the non running days.
I read an interesting article in the latest Runners World (Aus version) about mental attitude to fitness. I had a look at the guys book on Amazon and to be honest it really isn’t for me, I certainly have no problems with being motivated to run, on the contrary I probably need to be reined in from time to time if anything. However the author did have an interesting approach to calming race nerves which I have decided to adopt, being that race stress is probably my biggest weakness. What he does is wear a rubber band on his wrist every day and then add it to a ball each night, putting a new band on the next day. He then takes the ball in is race kit as a reminder of all the hard work that went into getting there. I like it, it is a simple visual queue and would probably work with my mindset. So when you see me with a rubber band on my wrist and a rubber band ball at races you will know why.
I did have the idea of getting some different coloured bands to represent different sessions, speed work, long runs, recovery runs etc, but it turned out to be a futile task and I just ended up with the plain old rubber band coloured rubber bands. What exactly is that colour anyway? Office Supply Brown?
Why is it so?
Why can Dean Karnazes run 1000s and 1000s of klms a year and not get a stress fracture, it’s not bloody fair, where is a stampy foot emoticon when you need one??
I was telling Jo the other day that while I have been injured that I have been prone to bouts of bitter belligerence 
I walk through food courts and watch people blithely stuffing their faces with all manner of garbage, seemingly oblivious to the damage it is doing them, I just want to smack the food out of their hands and shout “Don’t you know what this is doing to you, don’t you care?”. And worse still I watch on as the running world goes on without me, people running without incident and I just want to scream “IT’S NOT FAIR WHY ME? Why did I have to get injured?”, then I feel a little embarrassed and I grow up 
Hopefully the end is nigh, I don’t mind being narky but I hate being bitter.
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
Lance Armstrong
