Just your average Monday morning

Yeah, ok, so I ran a marathon last Saturday, but did I do it comfortably? Am I strong enough to do it and then recover quickly? Nope. My muscles are still wonderfully sore two days later, so the run commute to work will have to wait until tomorrow. I did some core exercises instead.

January has been a good month. Despite a cold that made me miss a few days' running, and despite our holiday in the North that ”forced” me to replace some running sessions with skiing, I still managed to put together a month quantity that's my second best ever (the first being November, with the ultra intervals). But it does kind of bug me that things aren't moving...faster, somehow. I realise I'm being impatient, and maybe a bit too careful, (not to mention that this is a first world problem, and did you know children in Africa are starving?) but planning for ultras means gradually increasing your long run distances (or, rather, your time on the go) considerably. How can I do that if I can hardly walk down the stairs the day after?

Sometimes I torture myself by looking at training programmes and despairing at the huge amounts of time they crave on the weekends (with long runs both on Saturday and Sunday). Other times I get all gung-ho and confident, and don't care at all about what they say, I'm still preparing for this in my own way. Sometimes the ultra looms over me like a mountain, other times I just break it down into segments and see it as a fun adventure. And then I think that I must be the only person in the whole world who gets sore muscles after a marathon.

Yep, that's the kind of things I think about on a Monday morning, right before my work week starts. Pretty normal, really.