Back up and running?

After another bike ride in lieu of a run over the holiday weekend we have just had, it was high time to get back out there. Returning from work this evening, the leg felt good.

I jumped up and down a couple of times. No pain or stiffness.

I ran down the stairs – I live on the second floor – and back up to the flat. Still nothing, and the stairs are where I usually feel it.

I stretched and rowed a gentle kilometre on the ergo, my usual pre-run warm-up. All well. Stretched again.

Downstairs, I took the side entrance, as then if things didn’t work out, I could just go a couple of hundred metres round the block, back to the front door, and nobody would be any the wiser. I took it slowly and completed ¾ of the lap of the block. It boded well to continue straight on. I even overtook an even slower moving runner before diving through the subway, then turned left along the northern end of the lakes.

It was a sunny evening, with a warm light breeze – the type you forget exists in winter. Couples sat on the benches and the grass, icecreams in hand. Ducks marshalled their ever-increasing numbers of ducklings around. Kids threw them crumbs, more often than not stolen by the more manouverable black-headed gulls. And the Lake Runner was back in his natural habitat. Everything was as it should be.

Except it wasn’t. By the first corner of the lake, about where the photograph of the 3.15 pacesetters on my post of the 21^st May was taken, I felt a slight twinge in my left calf. Perhaps it was just as I hadn’t run for a while. I took the upper path along the eastern edge of the Sørtedams lake; it is less crowded there. The problem with the lakes is that there are so many people out on a nice evening that you cannot stop in front of them all. People who are not good at running stop to catch their breath, or to try to get rid of a stitch. I don’t!

Within a few hundred metres, it became apparent that the slight twinge was indeed the old injury. What to do? There was no traffic, so I crossed the road, turned round to face the way I had come, and started walking back along the opposite pavement. At least, I consoled myself, I had had the sense this time to stop before I did any serious damage. It was not the end of the world, it was not far to walk home, and it wasn’t snowing like it had been the last time. I crossed the road at the lights back at the northern end and,

with a mixture of

‘Oh it is nice to see her,’

and

‘Oh no what if she spots me like this?’,

I noticed a friend on her bike waiting for the lights in the other direction.

I felt she needed an explanation as to what I was doing strolling around in somewhat unconventional clothing and, after hearing what she was up to, gave her the story ending with something along the lines of ‘…and of course there is nothing worse than walking home along the road in your running kit.’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘except of course when someone you know sees you….’

Well quite.