Music plays an important part in my life. I go to a lot of gigs and listen to music most days at work. I find it can lift you, empathise with your foul mood or just plain make you smile.
When I am running, most of the time I find I have a song stuck in my head. It can be the last one I listened to, or just something completely random that has popped in there for no particular reason. At the moment I'm going through a rather irritating phase of having the song below stuck in my head when I go for early morning runs, and it's one that I definitely have to encourage back out of my head by any means necessary!!
Good morning!
Last weekend, I was at the beginning of a much-needed week off work, and so was feeling great. I had some lovely things planned in to do, and I also knew that I would be able to go for at least one run during the week, in daytime. Since the clocks were changing that weekend I knew that all my weekday runs going forwards were going to have to be dull laps around Green Park, as my usual run routes are on unlit footpaths.
And so on the Saturday morning, I headed off with hopes of running 8-9 miles, to keep me on track for my 'run 10 miles by the end of 2012' target. My current favourite track is 'Not Giving In' by Rudimental, so I had that stuck in my head.
However, give in I did.
I have absolutely no idea what happened, but after a mile and a half I just felt like I couldn't keep going. I thought I would change the plan and run 6-7 miles instead, in the hopes that the thought of a shorter distance would encourage me and buoy me up, however it didn't work. My legs felt good, my breathing was fine, no stitch, I just couldn't keep going. I forced myself to drag my sorry backside around 4.5 miles, but it has to be said, I came very close to calling Pete and asking him to come and pick me up. Something was definitely up with my body, because by the time I got home, I was a sneezing mess, and one of my eyes had swollen up really badly. I felt like I had a cold that had come on over the course of the run!
It's safe to say that this wasn't part of the marathon training plan! I think basically my body was trying to tell me that I hadn't given it a cut-back week yet, and that it was in holiday mode thank you very much so enough with this running lark!
By the time I woke up the next day, all signs of the cold had gone.
A couple of days later, I had to run again. I knew I had to run again, however I was feeling so deflated I was dreading it. I was trying to talk myself out of it, but thankfully Pete wouldn't let me! And so run I did, and this time I had 'Can't Stop' by Red Hot Chili Peppers stuck in my head. And this time I didn't! I ran an easy 6 miler, and could have run further but decided I wanted to save my long run for the weekend, as that is going to be the routine going forwards.
Fast forward to today. I am sitting here enjoying a glass of wine in celebration of achieving my target of a 10 mile run by the end of the year, 8 weeks and 1 day early! Again, I have no idea how it happened. I set out with the aim of 8 miles, just so as not to intimidate myself too much, and to cut a long (2 hours 51 seconds long to be precise!) story short, I added loops here there and everywhere and before I knew it, I had done 10 miles. And the song stuck in my head? It was that Rudimental one again. 'Not Giving In'. And this time, I didn't!
And just in case you still have 'Good Morning' stuck in your head (sorry about that), here is the Rudimental track for you, which will hopefully replace it!
Not Giving In
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