A Misery Shared

I take the bus today, ahead of my second long training run tonight for the Buxton Half Marathon. I’m hoping to do eleven miles tonight.

L intends to run as well. She’ll be setting off from Nottingham and I from Derby. Hopefully we should meet somewhere in the middle. We’ve both entered the Half Marathon, a misery shared is a misery made marginally more sufferable and all that. If it stays this hot, the half marathon, which being in Buxton obviously isn’t going to be flat and is only two weeks ago could refine suffering.

L’s dreading tonight’s run because she reckons she feels so tired and skipped the gym, to save her legs for it. The run should wake her up, shouldn’t it? She’s starting off with a stretch along the canal. Alongside it, not in it. Well if the run doesn’t wake her up, toppling into the canal should do the trick.

I’m dreading it too but mainly because I went out for a walk at lunchtime and almost died in the heat. It’s going to be a hot run.

We may never meet, she’ll be asleep in Beeston and I’ll be collapsed from heat exhaustion in Long Eaton. Just got to make sure I ring her before I pass out. As L says, the way to get through it is to think of my first pint. First? and the rest.

In the end it’s not too hot as there’s light breeze, yet all the same I feel sick after only two miles. A quick stop and a bit of head between the legs and I recover. Then at four miles, stitch. I never get stitch, well not since running cross country at school when they made us do it straight after the indigestible school lunch. Perhaps I should have chucked up, I mean at two miles, not years ago after the school lunches.

I walk a bit, even though I know this won't help. Then I turn my music up, in some odd attempt to blot out the stitch and start running again. In half a mile I’ve run it off and the rest of the run starts to become enjoyable.

At just past nine miles I meet L. Well actually I would have run straight past her, heading in the opposite direction, but she sees me and detours towards me. We run together, for a minute or so, after which I unsociably push on at my own pace. I wait for her a few minutes down the road at the retail park that had been my intended destination. Only 10.3 miles but that's enough, I’m not going any further tonight.

Its good weather so we take the dogs down to one of the local pubs that we don’t usually frequent, as we can sit outside with them. It has Thwaites' Lancaster Bomber on, which almost makes it all worthwhile.