If you were to look at my Garmin data for this week then you wouldn’t be too impressed. According to my Garmin, I have run once this week. ONCE. To make things worse, the distance and time were not even that great. Maybe this is why I do not publicly share my Garmin run info.

Hell.

I learn’t a couple things this week.

The second thing I learn’t was that a lot of the negative thoughts are both literally and physically just in my head. Possibly a by-product of a runner who likes being inside ones own head. None-the-less, an inner deposition to challenge oneself by allowing those ‘you cannot do this’ thoughts to come through just so that one can then prove the voices wrong is probably not a healthy way to continue since sleep deprivation (a by-product of my job) tends to fuck with my ability to give the voices a slap.

The first thing I learn’t this week (the reversal of these lessons is important since I did not fully understand the first until I, once again, reinvented the realisation wheel to discover the second.)

The ‘it’s all in my head realisation’ is really stating to bore me so I will need to remember this post in the future.

Anyway. The first thing I learn’t is this:

“Sleep is my wife and running is my mistress” and I really need to keep them apart. Earlier in the week, they got wind of each other and wife decided not to play along which totally screwed my schedule. But like all affairs – even imaginary ones – they work best when kept separate, so I chose to meet my mistress for a 3am rendezvous in the work gym this week.

I discovered the only way to make a treadmill work for me is to use it for interval training. Now, I am not a fan of treadmills or interval training but I understand the importance of the second and how the first can help me do these sessions. So that is where I have been this week, 3am, 25 minutes on a treadmill with it putting me through my paces.

So it was because of these interval sessions (which I am not a major fan of) and that until today, I had not run outside since last Saturday that I was feeling a little down. But post 3.5 mile run in Richmond Park, which I will talk about more in a ‘Hell is other people’ post I am currently composing, I am positive once again.

Plus I now have my running bib for the Ealing half and tomorrow (16/9) I will be running one more 13.1 mile run – a flat one this time, just to see if I can get close to the 2 hour mark. I also shaved my hair – well the barber did – yesterday so I am all trimmed for the race in a couple of weeks time.

A weird week, most definitely a masochistic one – even if it isn’t muddy. Keep on running.