chickenfeet

3.2km 15m49s

First run in shorts of the year. 3.2km in 18m30s. That's slow but it's still only March and I have weight to lose. Time for the bear to shed his winter coat.

This morning I ran outdoors for the first time since injuring my ankle at Christmas. For the first time since then it's been above freezing for long enough that I could be reasonably sure that the sidewalks would not be icy. I ran for a bit over 5 minutes at a reasonable, fairly fluent pace. Everything felt fine. No soreness in the ankle and doing the staircases for the last couple of weeks seems to have got me back to an OK fitness level. If it stays warm and I don't get any weird pain setting in I'll try for 10 minutes tomorrow.

Round about Christnas, for no apparent reason, my right ankle decided to stop working. This is, admittedly, incident one squillion and one in a long running saga but I'm fed up as basically both ankles had been performing quite adequately for the last year or so. Bottom line, I currently need a lace up brace on my ankle just to be able to walk and running is entirely out of the question. This really sucks. I'm going to see a physio at lunchtime today but I have no idea if they will be able to do anything.

It's that time of year when running becomes an exercise in will power. If one gives up now then that that's pretty much it until spring, which is not my plan at all. So this morning I was out in leggings, hat, gloves and cycling jacket. It was about the right degree of warmth/windproofness for a morning when the temperature is 1C and the wind is gusting out of the north at around 30km/h. Overall, it was not unpleasant. We shall see how the will power stacks up when it drops another ten degrees.

I've been having a hard time with the running for the past couple of weeks. It's mostly been mental but a slight hamstring strain hasn't helped. Today was good though. 3.2km in 15m58s so not great but at least it felt like running again.

I tried for a little bit more distance this morning but with no attempt to run at anything faster than a very comfortable jog. 4.1km in 24m23s. Just under 6m/km.

I did my refereeing fitness test tonight. 2400m run in 11m56s which isn't stellar but is OK I think all things considered. 40m sprint in 7.3s. That sucks but I've never had much in the way of sprinting speed.

I went running this morning. It's damp and a bit blustery so not ideal conditions but I did 3.2km in 18m10s. That works out at 5.7mins/km which isn't too bad. Lets put it this way, if I could run 5km in 25 minutes I would be delighted at this point. The bad news is that I am doing it in almost continual pain. It became very noticeable around the 8 minute mark and was bad enough to get me very close to giving up. As it was i decided to keep going and it didn't get any worse so I guess I just have to accept that that is the price of staying in reasonable shape.

I was out running again this morning which, incidentally, is not much fun in the prevailing heat and humidity. There's a buffet restaurant built from old rail cars on Queen's Quay that I regularly run past. It houses a largish feral cat colony. This morning one of them was lying dead on the grass right next to the sidewalk. There was no obvious trauma so I guess it was probably natural causes. I didn't look too closely as it was already covered in flies.

Yesterday lemur_catta and I hooked up with oakenguy who had driven up from Boston for the circus festival. One clown seemed very perplexed by us. I think it was when I suggested that the red and white "Canada" umbrella he was wearing on his head probably indicated that he was CSIS agent secretly infiltrating a terrorist clown cell. He was certainly lurking suspiciously close to the pie shop. More clowns and other circusy things today I expect.