The difficult second album

As 2011 drew to a close, and with my half century approaching I decided to try and cram in a personal challenge in the spirit of ‘just because it was there’. I had heard through the running grapevine that someone had set up this Facebook challenge to run every day in December, and I thought it sounded like a good thing to do.

And there was something else on my ‘to do’ list that I decided to try and tick off – write a blog. So neatly enough in December I did run every day- from the first to the thirty first, in chilly and not so chilly temperatures, often in darkness and way too often at a silly time of day- I ran on the shortest day, on my birthday, on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and finally on Hogmanay, and I wrote a blog about it all. http://decemberism.wordpress.com

What I discovered from running every day was : 1. you CAN find times to run on even the busiest of days or months 2. completing this kind of challenge turned out to be enjoyable and appealed to my sense of ‘completedness’ 3. you quickly run out of kit when you run every day and 4.if you run every day in the coldest darkest month, you are quite likely to pick up an injury !

The blogging was harder to find time for , but I enjoyed it and doing both kept both going, even although not many folk were reading the blog, by committing to writing it down I had to keep running. I briefly considered continuing with the daily run after Dec 31 but although I did run on Jan 1st and on days thereafter, after the crescendo of December I settled back into my usual routine and the blog lay gathering dust.

Having enjoyed writing about December running, I thought even if I did not run every day I might keep a blog going, and would use it to keep a log of my running and any races or running adventures I encountered, but  if I was to  keep writing I needed to come up with a new name as Decemberism does have a bit of a time specific feel to it !

Then sometime in February as I was upping my mileage as part of training for The Edinburgh Rock and Roll Half marathon, I ground to a halt with a niggle that had been in the background since December  but because I had ignored it, had turned into something that was stopping me running . This made writing about running tricky and I reckoned writing about my running injury might be tedious for me never mind my imaginary readers .

So running curtailed and blog abandoned.

Now we are in May and my running year so far has been a bit stymied through various events but after going down a number of  routes and explorations to fix the foot,  I eventually followed the advice of my good running chum and visited a podiatrist, who after a swift diagnosis and parting with cash for orthotics  has me running again, and although I had to abandon the Half Marathon I am training after a fashion for the Women’s 10K in Glasgow on May 13.

Bit of a lengthy first post for the blog that feels like the difficult second album, and now renamed- the unfinished sentence.  Mostly I will drivel on about running and of course the inevitable otherness of life that has to fit around it.