Monday 14 May 2012

Damn it to Hell

14/05/2012 - Well it's been 15 days since the Milton Keynes marathon and I've only just been able to bring myself to post about it. The reason is simple - I did not do it.

I'd been getting sick of the training and just wanted to get the marathon over with. The big training runs had begun to grate big time and I'd had enough of being out running for in excess of three hours at a time. For the first time since I started running I was beginning to not enjoy it. Anyway I'd stopped running a week before, just doing a couple of gentle jogs, and was as ready as I was going to be. Then I went for a combat training session on the Saturday morning before the Sundays race and afterwards felt a bit "off". Went home and after a cup of tea sat down the couch - this was about 11:30am - watching the telly, closed my eyes. I awoke and discovered I'd slept for four hours. Feeling a bit crap for the rest of the day and evening I had an early night. The alarm woke me nice and early on Sunday for the marathon but I felt awful. My wife took one look and said that there was no way I was going to be doing a marathon anytime soon.

So rather depressed I spent the day feeling shite and sorry for myself as friends braved to appalling weather of the day to complete the marathon. The only consolation was that the weather was indeed horrendous and I got to watch the British Touring Car Championship for a good chunk of the day. Below is a picture of how I might have looked finishing the Milton Keynes Marathon had I of run it.



It took about a week for me to stop feeling sorry for myself; it was not so much missing the marathon but having done all that training I had nothing to show for it and the thought that I would have to do it all again if I was ever to do a full marathon. So I took the family to see the new Avengers Assemble film at the local cinema and I must say it went a big way to cheering me up. Very good it is too.

So I had a bit of a break and wondered if I'd get my running mojo back. Good news is that I have and I'm really enjoying doing 6 miles of fun and fast (for me) running instead of the 18 miles of torture I had been doing.this is good because I have the Adidas Thunder Run at the end of July - something I'm really looking forward to doing. This year it'll be a real challenge as there is only 5 of us this year so I'm looking at something between 36 to 48 miles in the 24 hours. I've also decided to run for Help for Heroes, a charity that needs no introduction. If you feel you like to help push me towards my collection target and in turn do a bit of good supporting our Armed Forces wounded please do so via my just giving page - link below:

https://www.justgiving.com/Stuart-Fielder-ThunderRun




Look at the picture above - you can see I'm smiling. A bit down after missing the marathon I took the opportunity to do a bit of extra training organised by one of my TR24 team members Rakesh Patel at his purpose built studio in Letchworth. It was, as usual, brilliant. An hour and 15 minutes of Combat Conditioning Pad work drills for non-stop 2 min rounds with small breaks between each set - just enough time to swap pads for gloves. Very physically demanding but very rewarding.

Buoyed by the training session I went off on Saturday the 12th of May to the Martial Arts Show at the NEC in Birmingham with my daughter and a bunch of people from my karate club. It was quite a bit smaller than the show I used to go to, SENI, but I must say they did very well with what they had. Plenty of stalls to buy things from and an impressive array of martial artists demonstrating their martial arts. I particularly enjoyed the Shaolin monks and the Muay Thai.  I came back with a lovely new set of focus pads and a new mouth guard.

RDX Focus Pads - lovely.

Then last Sunday we had a visitor. A very good friend of my wife and I popped round for and chat and to pop a bunch of flowers in for my wife - a thank you for a birthday treat. Turned out that was just a ruse and the real reason she had come round was to surprise us with the news that she had managed to purchase four tickets to the London Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony and three of them were for my wife, my daughter and me. Cue lots and lots of jumping around and excited shouting etc. Only issue is that it's going to mean a lot more organising as the ceremony is on the Friday of the TR24, the Friday I was intending to travel there. Instead I'll have to travel up on the Saturday morning after very little sleep. Nevermind - it's a once in a lifetime event that I have no intention of letting anything get in the way of.

So right now I'm on a bit of a high which is nice after the low of the week post missed marathon. Oh and in a fit of madness I put my name into the hat for the London Marathon - you never know ;-).



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