I'll take it

Today's image is of the lagoon next to the boathouse, including the city-to-sea bridge and, to the right of the photo, the albatross sculpture. The Jog Squad sometimes does circuit training around here.

Leonie sent me a text at around 7am this morning to let me know they'd missed their connecting flight and were now going to be arriving around 10. I lay in bed for a while but never really went back to sleep and it slowly dawned on me that everything outside was quiet and still. Sure enough, it was a mild calm morning and I had just enough time to fit in my 35 minute homework run. I also wanted the opportunity to prove to myself that I could have an ok run still.

Running from home equals rolling hills, downhill stretches and uphill climbs. From the top of our path it's a one minute warm-up run on the flat, then a quick short uphill to the main road, a short flat recovery stretch, a small rolling hill, a short steep hill, then it's downhill all the way to the Brooklyn shops. From there I ran up the very gradual incline to the point where Brooklyn hill drops off down towards town, then turned around and ran past the shops down to Garfield street, where I climbed for about 10 minutes to get back up to the Ridgway. I still had another ten minutes to kill by this point, so ran another couple of rolling hills before turning back down Farnham Street. I picked up the pace and sprinted along our flat street to home.

This still wasn't a fast run and the uphill bits felt harder than they should have done. But I could feel my muscles remembering what to do and my lungs switching back on. It felt good to sprint the last couple of minutes, and I could sense my body preparing for speed again. I'm curious to see how I run tomorrow night, and whether things continue their slow, gradual improvement. I suspect that my leg strength suffered during my confinement to the x-trainer, so I'll make an effort to fit some weights in this week.

So, all up I'm feeling a lot more positive about things, and that's most of the battle won already! It was such a beautiful morning for running, and I had enough time to shower before sitting out on the veranda to watch Nic and Leonie's plane fly in.