I made my long awaited return to running outdoors last week. I'd had a few sessions on the treadmill during the week and I decided the time was right to take things outside.
The first run I did was a 4 mile effort in Tynemouth. I did David Fairlamb's Beach Bootcamp straight after that. I found the bootcamp very difficult indeed with limited flexibility in my right ankle making for awkward movement on the uneven sand.
Fast forward 7 days to last Saturday and with more flexibility, Beach Bootcamp was much easier. What a difference a week makes!
In between those 2 Beach Bootcamps were a number of 4 and 5 mile runs. An easy steady pace was the order of the day and I'm glad to report that all runs passed by incident free.
The first run I did was a 4 mile effort in Tynemouth. I did David Fairlamb's Beach Bootcamp straight after that. I found the bootcamp very difficult indeed with limited flexibility in my right ankle making for awkward movement on the uneven sand.
Fast forward 7 days to last Saturday and with more flexibility, Beach Bootcamp was much easier. What a difference a week makes!
In between those 2 Beach Bootcamps were a number of 4 and 5 mile runs. An easy steady pace was the order of the day and I'm glad to report that all runs passed by incident free.
The crowning glory of the week, however, was the 10.5 mile Peter's Pies 6 Tyne Bridges Challenge on Sunday. I had originally planned to walk some of this route but in the end I didn't need to. I reached the finish line at the Millennium Bridge in very fine shape indeed. I wrote the following on Twitter at the time: "Less than 4 months since I broke my ankle and I found that 10.5 miles in 01:59:36 very easy indeed. This comeback is gathering pace.".
That just about sums it up and had somebody told me back in May, when I broke my ankle, that I would run 29.6 miles in the 2nd week of September I would have laughed at them. I'm really surprised that my running fitness seems to be coming back very quickly. It had taken 70 weeks of training to be able to comfortably run 19 miles per day for 7 consecutive days, before I broke my ankle. I think I'll be back to doing that in another 8 weeks.
I'm still remaining cautious though and I'm prepared to reign things in at the slightest sign of pain in the Paddy Power Bionic Ankle.
If the physio reads any of this, he'll go mental! Especially the bit where I tell you that I'm doing the Great North Run this weekend. I was offered a place 2 weeks ago and simply couldn't turn it down. I thought at the time, that I'd try to get round in 3 hours. I think a more sensible estimate is probably 2 hours 40 minutes. Any quicker than that would be foolish at this stage of my recovery.
So it looks like I'll be on for The Great North Run, a personal training session and Beach Bootcamp this week. I'll say it again; "This comeback is gathering pace!".
