Sunday morning run

Yesterdays's 15 miler was a perfect example of why I sometimes have bad training runs.

I got up at 6am to get some porridge in me, and pottered about for an hour to digest it.

I set off, resenting the early start, and was pleasantly surprised by the nice weather.

Settling at a decent pace was hard. I think this is another problem I get when I'm carrying stuff - in this case drinks. I was trying a new route though so thought I'd get there eventually.

I started to grumble to myself about how annoying this was, which I knew wasn't helpful, but I couldn't help myself.

Half a mile before my turnaround mark, my stomach started to feel a bit weird. I just thought it was being odd as it was the morning, so tried to put it to the back of my mind, as I didn't need another mental roadblock holding me back.

On the way back, it happened again, and this time I had to stop as it felt like Etna was rumbling in there.

I started again, but at a slower pace as that seemed to make it easier, but that only lasted about 20 minutes until it felt like I was gonna explode.

There's a leisure centre on the new route, so I thought I'd try to pop in there as I passed it, but it wasn't open that early on a Sunday - which I found odd.

Don't get me wrong, I don't know much about leisure centres/gyms, but I just assumed they opened early so the keep-fitters could feel the burn nice and early.

In this case, I was wrong.

So I kept going - more slow-jogging than running now - in an almost bent over way.

I won't describe what happened when I went home, but it's certainly added something to my pre-run preparations, which now looks like this:

• eat early, and give good length of time to digest
• hydrate properly - before, during and after
• mentally prepare for it, and try not to find the reasons it's hard

I need to try to get these right before every run otherwise the training won't be doing enough to get me round.

So, more planning before training runs needed!

Joyous.