After the bliss of running fast near pain free yesterday morning, the hangover came on Sunday morning for the final long run before Rotterdam. The legs were stiff and simply didn’t want to know for the first six miles or so, aching and hurting, not firing properly. I stopped numerous times to stretch, things weren’t really getting much better. The strong head wind was making things particularly miserable.
Like last week I considered calling it quits but I battled on, the thoughts that right at that moment there were tens of thousands of runners taking part in marathons all over the world inspired me to complete a long run that is actually the shortest so far this year thanks to the joys of tapering. At around seven miles, coinciding with the change in wind direction, things began to pick up. I never ran totally pain free but at least I was running more freely and the mile splits indicated this. I ended up running twelve miles with the final three miles under seven minutes per mile.
That done, so the rest of the day commenced with an action packed Bahrain GP and loads of work to be done. An adrenaline rush through the day which saw me unwind by catching up on the Paris Marathon. Kenny Bekele is such a joy to watch running, his form is perfect. If I run half as well as he did on Sunday I’ll be very happy indeed.