The Slow Long Claw Back to Fitness

It's been tough trying to get back to a 'fighting fit' stage. Currently I'm anything but. Because all my 'runs' previously were transferred to the elliptical and because I found the elliptical dead boring, I had pretty much reduced mileage to under 5k (but really mostly only 2k) and that didn't even translate to running on the road. In the heat. And it's been so hot. I come back from a run nowadays - and by that I mean the only 2 runs I've done this year - dripping with sweat and terribly disappointed in how slow all this is taking.

Yesterday Rich and I did our first trail walk again in ages. It almost didn't happen because it was pissing down at 7am. The rain stopped eventually and we mucked around. Before long it was 10 and getting too late to do anything. We made alternative plans - maybe we could walk to breakfast and walk back - before we decided to just bite the bullet and do the damn trail walk we'd planned to do in the first place. So after a quick breakfast, we headed out at close to noon.

My ankle and foot ached after our 2 hour trot and I ended up having to cut the walk short because it hurt too much. I don't think I had a huge pain tolerance in the first place (my motto has always been NOT to run through the pain) but it seems what little I had has now been shot and I spend half the time now icing something or the other. That said, aches and pains aside, the walk was good.

We took the trail behind my house and walked to the nature reserve, did half of it and ended up back on Rifle Range where I threw in the towel and insisted we get a taxi back. It was nice to be among all the green again and in spite of my sore ankle, I really do love trail, even with the bugs, mozzies and all them creepy crawlies. Hopefully fingers crossed I can get down to attempting a run on trail again without killing myself by tripping over a root or something equally idiotic.

Incidentally, I've been using the Daily Mile to log my training. I started using it because the Masters Swimming Club had a swim challenge they issued to all of us and I had to sign up to join the challenge. It's pretty amazing though and it can never hurt to know how many donuts you've burnt off or how many tvs you've powered. If any of my friends are using it, add me as your friend! It'll be fun to train together virtually! There's never any harm having more training buddies!

Junk

I hate my ipod. Early this year I thought I'd really want a cool arm strap to wear whilst running, and because of that I needed an MP3 player so I'd have a reason to wear the strap. This probably sounds bizarre to everyone, but my brain works strangely, I genuinely did think the arm band was cooler than the MP3 player.

So I got the ipod Nano and got itunes installed on my computer. It was so much of a hassle that I uploaded 2 CDs and gave up. This essentially meant that I was running to the same songs all the time. I finally got really sick of those songs last month and had to beg my sister to help me put more songs on my Nano, which she very generously did. Now because the Nano is such a stupid device, it essentially erased everything I put in and replaced it with her songs. Which didn't affect me too much, until last night. I figured I wanted to run to some jazzy tunes for the long runs, because dance tracks just annoyed the hell out of me when I was dying of exhaustion.

Of course being the piece of junk it is, everything my sis had put in for me got erased and replaced by one sad Jazz CD's worth of songs. Which meant I spent the rest of the night having to convert CD after CD just so I'd have enough songs to run to tonight. Aaaaaargggghhh! For all the marketing and hype about the Nano, it has to be the biggest piece of crap ever invented. It complicates everything, restricts everything and is the world's least user-friendly MP3 player. I'm now thinking of getting either a Sony or a Creative to replace this after I throw it against the wall repeatedly in frustration.