Oh bloody hell. Not again. Chest pain, short of breath, appointment with the GP, referral for a chest X-ray, antibiotics, painkillers, morose tone of self pity. Yes, that’s right, all signs point to pleurisy again, and this is bad news for the mileage log...
As regular readers of this blog will know (having read this and that), I have had my running disrupted by this particular ailment before, last time in spectacular fashion just days before a marathon, ending in a couple of trips to A&E and one severely unimpressed brother toeing a start line all by himself.
This time is different. The pleurisy now is a much milder case, with less acute pain and the underlying symptoms having more or less already cleared. I took myself to the doctor this morning after conceding that I was in too much pain during my runs over the weekend (a pleasing 10 miles on Saturday and another 5.5 on Sunday), and that the chest pain was disrupting my sleep, which is much better than being taken to hospital in an ambulance having fainted into one's breakfast. I’ve no races planned until the Alloa Half Marathon on March 20th, so no-one's going to be disappointed that I’ll miss anything. In short, I can afford to take it easy for a week or so.
But one pseudo-important thing will suffer: the stats. I’ve been holding back from telling you about how pleased I am with my training so far in 2011 because I didn’t want to jinx it, and more to the point, I wanted to get a good couple of months done before I started bragging about how well I was doing. But here we are, five weeks into the year, and already I’ve been derailed by forces beyond my control. So we’ll have to celebrate just these slightly-above-average five weeks, as follows:
Week one: 11 miles (still easing back in after Christmas, New Year etc)
Week two: 22 miles (and a ski session!)
Week three: 26 miles (looking good!)
Week four: 28 miles (great trend!)
Week five: 30 miles (first 30 mile week since August! Wahey!)
As you can imagine, the first five figures produce an extremely pleasing graph which was promising for the weeks ahead. My weekly average currently projects that I would total 1219 miles this year, a solid 368 more than in 2010, with an upward trend indicating that much more was to come. Things were looking rosy...
Week six: 10 antibiotics and a million painkillers, please
Now I know that this shouldn’t matter – a week off or with only a few miles in it isn’t the end of the world. But I love my stats and I love logging the miles, and I hate seeing that pleasing graph assaulted by the banalities of illness and injury. So for the next few days, I will mostly be on the sofa (when not at work) and giving my running shoes a break. Sigh. If you're lucky enough to be fit, well and healthy, then do me a favour: go out for a run this week, just because you can.
Happy running
Dave
P.S. - I think I might start signing off with a Bridget Jones-style summary to my posts, rather like this:
2011 to date - miles: 117.25, parkruns: 1, races: 0
(NB My running year started on the first Monday in 2011, which was January 3rd)
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