running stories

so now i have been running for almost 8 months. the last time in my life i ever ran this much was in high school. and we had no choice but we could defeat that requirement. i recall we ran on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Interesting thing is no one talked about running form, shoes, stretches or warm up. we left our classrooms and went a running. if anyone got injured from running, I can’t remember. I would know.

but since i started running last year, i have had a partial tear of my calf muscle which was a real scare because some doctor was of the opinion i needed surgery yesterday. only reason this didn’t happen is because i used dr. google and it was of the opinion of conservative treatment and two other doctors also agreed with dr. google. so that was it. then this year once the tear had recovered, i resumed running and i think one day i pushed it too hard. this time it was the hamstring that must have been strained but i decided not to see a physician. i think it has healed. i just decided to run and stop only when the pain increased.

this brings me to another debate. use of technology in running. a while back it was elite runners doping on steroids, now i think manufacturers are competing on what shoes will give you competitive advantage. maybe they should just have the shoes run and we choose the best shoe. or shoe and track. no need to have athletes battling it out when shoes can do the trick. i have nothing against good shoes. i run in good shoes. they are so good, tarmac almost feels soft. but they have such a short distance. for example i have done about 560km and if i was to listen to the manufacturer, i should run maybe another 80km in them and get a new pair. sounds much like new phones, if you don’t replace the old one, you don’t receive updates.

but all this is a digression. this is not the story i wanted to tell you. i use a garmin watch & one of the things it comes with is training plans for cycling and running. you can train to run a 5k, 10k or 21k which in americanese would be 3 miles, 6 miles and 13.6 miles respectively. i already attempted the 5k and had a pb of 22minutes. i am still proud of that timing. yesterday in my training plan, i was to do speed repeats: warm up 15min, run at a pace of 4min/km for a minute & jog for 1 minute x6 then run 3:30 min/km for 30 sec and jog for a min x6. I gave up after the 4th attempt of the first bit. I must have been fatigued from the previous day 50km ride. so in the evening i decided to do a recovery run of 10km and felt much better.

i also discovered that running while listening to music can be such a good thing. i have some headphones that have noise cancellation and since i do my runs early in the cool of morning, they are just perfect. and i run towards oncoming traffic so unless some idiot is overtaking dangerously, or drunk driving, i am not so worried about vehicular traffic.

keep it here for my next run.

and now some pictures

• 

  nairobi’s skyline from westlands

• 

  park with a paved road. i prefer the paved road to the trails

• 

• 

  maybe they should do a water something in this park

• 

  more park users