(I’m writing this the day after the run to capture how my legs feel on…the day after.)
It was cool and a hard rain was blasting down from the heavens, as is often the case at this time of year. I waited and waited some more, aware of how much daylight I had left and how much time I would need.
By 3 p.m. the rain was still falling steadily but had eased up from moonsoon-like to merely light. I knew if I put off running again — I was already two weeks past my ‘all clear’ time frame — that I would keep finding excuses.
So I ran.
I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and shorts and definitely did not feel underdressed. My hands, in fact, felt like blocks of ice shortly into the run. If I run again in similar conditions I’ll bring along a pair of gloves.
I chose to run the Brunetter River portion of the Central Valley Greenway, a 2km stretch illustrated below via Google Maps.
I had planned on running 5K and the run started well. I had a spring in my step, I was listening to one of my most favorite songs evar (Guadalcanal Diary’s “Litany (Life Goes On)” and I felt good for just having made the commitment. By the 1 km mark my hands were numb, my lungs were ablaze and I was experiencing unpleasant cramps. None of this was surprising, really. Three and a half months is long enough to lose pretty much all of your conditioning. By the time I got back to the main gate I decided to call it quits with only 2K completed. While it’s quite a bit less than what I planned, it’s a start and I’m confident I’ll last longer next time (which should be Thursday).
As for how the legs feel: Goods new, everybody! /Farnsworth
The ankle is perfectly fine and I only feel some very light stiffness in the leg muscles. So far so good. Hopefully 2012 will be a good year for jogging, as long as the Mayans are wrong.
The meager stats:
1 km: 4:58 min/km
2 km: 5:16 min/km
Total time: 10:39 min. (woo, hardcore)
The first km is actually a pretty decent pace but the crash became very evident shortly after I passed the halfway mark and the reality of not running for 100 days caught up with me. But hey, even the 2K time is still better than some of my runs of yore so I’m still more fit than I was back in the pre-run days.
