Finding My Inner Runner

So, it's been far too long and, while it wasn't a parkrun, it was, quite literally, a run in a park, trying to keep up with guys more than 30 years younger than me. The conditions were perfect and, as you can see, the game had me pretty much covering the pitch. It did seem a little harder than I remember, but I'll put that down to Sunday's HM effort and nothing to do with being 15 months older than the last time I forced myself out of bed on a Saturday morning to do this kind of thing...

After an extended festive break, it was back to herding egg chasers in muddy fields again this morning. This morning it was the turn of Musselburgh to host Berwick. Just shy of 5k in cold, but bright and dry conditions, and there was actually some good rugby going on around me at times too. I'm always slightly surprised when I look at these maps with how much of the pitch I actually cover during the course of a game, and also the fact that there are sections of the field that I seem to totally avoid (in this case, the bottom left corner didn't see very much of me at all. No parkrun this week as a result of this, but I think, looking at the graph below, this still counts as a pretty intense interval sessionm..

OK, so I know August isn't quite over, but from my running perspective it is, and what a month it's been. I ran 10k or more on 5 occasions (I'd only managed that distance twice before in my life); so that was something a bit out of the ordinary, and something that if you'd suggested to me at the start of the year that I'd be capable of, I'd have probably thought you'd taken a knock to the head. In one of those 5 runs, I pushed my maximum distance out to 12k and, over the three runs that week, ran over 23k which was the farthest I'd run in a week so far. Earlier in the month, I shaved my 5k PB down to 32:26, and then, today, whilst herding egg-chasers around a muddy field, I took my monthly cumulative distance to over 100k for the first time. Let's see what September brings...

It's just possible that things are beginning to get out of hand. Back in early March, after having to put the programme on hold for 8 months, I picked up where I'd previously got to, and restarted week 2. My intention had always been to get to running non-stop for 40 minutes (the equivalent of one half of a game of rugby) Tonight, just over 3 months later, I ran non-stop for a full hour and covered 8k... Because of my refereeing, I'd always been fortunate to have a reasonable background level of fitness, but seriously, what is happening to me?

Ask any referee, and we have a love/hate relationship with 7s. On the one hand it's a bit of an end of season blow-off and you can have some lighthearted banter with the players. On the other, it's fast, constant and comes at the end of a long, gruelling season. So, today... Six games, 7 minutes each half, with a two minute turnaround at the break and 5 minutes between games. It's an U18s fixture, so I have at least 30 years on them. At one point, I'm devastated to discover that I still have one game left as I was already mentally heading for my shower. In the end 10¼km. Not non-stop, because it's rugby and spread over 12 seven minute periods that are stop-start due to the very nature of the game, but I'm still claiming it. Just before I started Couch to 5k, I did a 3 match tournament of 20 minute games, one after the other and was practically crawling by the end of it. Today, I added 3k and 20 minutes duration to that and I actually still felt like ...