Doubts and excuses

Two weeks in now ad it's starting to dawn on me that it's going to be a long haul. The other day I worked out that from when I started training to the race (or 'event' as I was recently advised to think of it as) was 39 weeks. That means I've already only got 37 weeks left! On the flipside, it means I've got 37 weeks of running almost every day, through the winter and increasingly longer distances.

It's these sort of thoughts that are already playing on my mind and I can see how it would be easy to start lagging back or even give up. Last Thursday I'd been working outdoors all day with a group of conservation volunteers and felt a little tired on the drive home. I've read plenty of advice on other blogs/websites that says you need to be careful and not overdo things, if you feel tired don't go out. I was starting to convince myself that I felt tired, so maybe I didn't need to go out ....

Thing is, I wasn't physically worn out by a really hard day. It had just been busy, but nothing out of the ordinary. I talked myself round and went for my scheduled run, feeling a lot better for it afterwards. But it was a close thing. The same thing happened the next day, when the evening after work was quite overcast, chilly and drizzly and making myself head out was again difficult.

Saturday presented problems too. It's the day of my longer run, which has now gone up to 1.5 hours and being indoors on a day off gives lots of excuses to delay and postpone. Again, when I finally went out it was fine and I had a now familiar feeling of relief that I'd passed another day and not let myself down.

So now it's Sunday and I'm having a day off, very nice. But it's a little concerning that two weeks in I'm already having minor battles with myself like this and it's only going to get harder with longer distances and much worse weather. I need to keep reminding myself why I'm doing this and remember that in the end I do enjoy running once I've started. I think what I'm really starting to realise is that maybe it's not the actual race (event?) that's going to be the challenge here, it's getting to the start line ......