Matt Gets Running

Well, that run was rub­bish. In fact, it wasn’t even a run. For some reason, when I got to the top of Bridge Val­ley Road, I lost all motiv­a­tion. It seemed partly phys­ical, partly men­tal — I just gave up, really. I tried to push on and run again after I’d walked for a bit to get my breath, but it didn’t really hap­pen. In the end, I altern­ated jog­ging and walk­ing, and cut today’s route short at just over 5K.

I really don’t know why this should be. Some­times, I’ve heard, you just have bad days — but this is really the first ter­rible day I’ve had, where I’ve actu­ally given up and star­ted walk­ing. Look­ing back in the archives, even on a hor­rible day last year, I man­aged to keep jogging.

I found a couple of art­icles that talk about bad run­ning days — one from HubPages, and one from Run­ning Times. They cite pos­sib­il­it­ies includ­ing sleep, food, ill­ness, hydra­tion, shoes, men­tal health and the weather. And some of these are quite pos­sible. I woke up with a bit of a head­ache this morn­ing, feel­ing like I’d not slept that well. Plus my food intake’s prob­ably been a bit excess­ive, and included a few more of the wrong things, since I went hol­i­day. And who knows? Maybe I’m just com­ing down with some­thing, or at least fight­ing it off — every­body around me seems to have a cold or flu at the moment.

So. Not much I can do about it, really, other than try­ing to live a little bit bet­ter over the next few days, per­haps cut­ting down on the caf­feine a bit (another habit that’s crept back since the hol­i­day), get­ting to bed early, and try­ing to wrestle my food intake back towards smal­ler, more healthy options. And hope my mid-week run goes okay this week. I’ll prob­ably try Wed­nes­day, but it’ll depend on the weather…