Brick Wall

I confess, I hit something of a brick wall. Running this week has been hard. And you'd better capitalise that suckah! And that's beside the fact that I've had the urge to eat practically everything in sight - damn you Mother Nature. During an unfortunate time of the month, I've been doing week 4 of the Ease into 10k programme, which has me running for 8 mins and walking for 1, 4 times (plus 10 minutes warm up/cool down) I can run half an hour straight so it shouldn't be so hard ... but it has been. Very. Yesterday I got on the treadmill, started the programme, got to 17 mins and realised I simply couldn't keep going. I had to stop. So I did.

The thing I've learned more than anything these past few months is not simply to listen to my body, but how to know that I'm really listening to it - and not to my greedy old brain. It didn't want to go on. It wanted to lay down on the sofa and just kick back for a bit. My body did. Not my mind. It was absolutely my body. And that's the big difference - because my sloth-prone mind would have liked to have stayed on the sofa three months ago and not got off ... well, maybe it would have thought about getting up to grab some snacks.

I briefly thought about not running today, that maybe my body needed a bit more rest. I thought I'd try a much shorter run, that I'd go back to the beginning of the 5k programme and take it easy. I got on the treadmill and finished week 4 of the 10k instead. Because my body said it didn't have no truck with no measly 90 second sessions of running. It wanted to leap and glide (well, huff and puff and sweat like a motherbitch) and it did, kind of.

Now I feel much better.