Yet another setback. If it's not busted ankles, torn tendons, achilles tendonitis, hip (SI Joint) upslips, then it's heel bursitis, ankle compression or goddam Covid. Enough already!
I was building a nice amount of momentum on my VO2 Max training. I could feel the changes to my fitness. My heel was getting better, and now I'm laid low with f*cking Covid for the second goddam time this year.
I've not asked for much. Just to have a problem free final training block before I run 300-goddam-km. And I can't even have that.
I have spent the last 9 months with problem, after problem, after problem. I have spent fortunes on rehab, have put in somewhere in the region of 350+ hours of training, not to mention close to that again in rolling, stretching and rehabilitation.
Right now I'm sick of it all. I have to sit idly by now while my chest heals up and lose most of what I've just busted my ass to gain. Not only that but I was meant to be on an all expenses paid 5 star trip to Croatia as of today. No chance of that now, despite all of the work I put in from the last year to help reach that target.
Running 200 miles is hard enough. Doing it while older and heavier than most makes it so much harder... and then add to it the list of injuries and illness I've had to contend with throughout all my training is just horrible. It really is.
Normally I'd just be getting on with it, telling myself it's another challenge to overcome. But It just does not stop. What do I do? It's funny in a way as less than two weeks ago I was having a conversation with my buddy Graham. I was explaining while sat by the camp fire we'd built that I seem to be a magnet for shit at times.
That it's one thing to set a big target, but that whenever I do it, the Universe decides that it's not quite hard enough and that it decides to bestow additional shit on me to make it more challenging to do something I really want to do.
It's not hard enough to run 300km in 9 months despite starting at the age of 47 with a battery of injuries and being overweight. No. That's too easy. What I need is another succession of injuries, covid (twice) and training blocks that go stop start non-fucking-stop for the entire period.
Consistency is critical to success... ironically the inconsistency I've endured is remarkably consistent. In fact it's become utterly predictable.
Want to know why i was even having that conversation with Graham in the first place? It was because I had earlier stepped over a fence that snapped while I was at the top of it, and had to Aikido roll in spectacular Steven Seagal-fashion mid air in order to avoid falling directly onto barbed wire, hit the ground at the bottom of a ditch and get away without any broken bones. (I guess I can be grateful for that much). It does, however illustrate the point. Do something simple... and somehow because I'm doing it it just has to be ten times harder than it already is.
OK, so I'm having a moan right now. I'm not a big believer in luck generally, but maybe that's just not true. Maybe there is something hardwired into me that means, deep down, I will be the one who will always make things so much harder for myself than they are for everyone else. Is it punishment? Is it some type of martyr-complex? I have to consider this as possibility right now. It was bad enough suffering for 25 hours running 100km injured... I can't even begin to describe how awful it will be for me to run 300km if I don't change shit like this over the next two months. I'm sick of suffering for what I want to do. It needs to change. I need to change something. I'm just going to take a few days between coughing and fever to figure out what that is and then nuke the shit out of it when I learn what it is.
Watch this space.
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