2015 - The Year of Recovery

2015 was never going to be a year of amazing races, having had my ankle chopped open, my anterior talo-fibular ligament (the one that stops you from twisting your ankle when it's working properly) sliced in half, a couple of bits of metal tapped into my bones and some plastic string sewn into them to strengthen up the whole thing.  Given that I was in a plaster cast and on crutches at the beginning of the year and not allowed put any weight on that foot still until I got an air boot on 17th January and then was allowed put weight on that foot without the boot 2 weeks later... any running was totally off until March.  It then turned out that once I was allowed out of the air boot, I had to learn how to walk again having not felt anything touch the bottom of my foot since the start of December 2014.  And that kinda cramped my style running-wise on top of the 4 months of zero aerobic (or even any load bearing) exercise.

I was terrified that I'd be totally back to zero.  Everyone told me that was rubbish and that I was fit and it'd take no time, but that only really applies to life-long athletes, or at least those who have been pretty fit for many years.  And that's not me.



And it did take a while.  A really good while.  And I'm still not quite there yet.  The graph above is the effects of my last 2 years of training. The blue curve is my chronic training load - long term training effect on fitness which you can read as "fitness level". (Pink is acute training load, so the huge spike is when I ran the Thames Path, then a flatline afterward when I did literally nothing, not even walking; and yellow is "freshness", so again a huge drop during Thames Path and then a big recovery when I sat on my bum for 4 months.)

2015 did, however, see some PBs of the 1/2 marathon variety.  Which was quite nice.  But I bottled a marathon and did rather averagely at a multi-day ultra.  That said, I hit the ultras again pretty early on in the recovery, which was a great psychological boost at the time.

Now that I'm pretty much recovered, in 2016 I want to get back to doing what I want to do, not what a broken bit of body limits me to.  So, after I've got Country to Capital out of the way (a silly little 43ish mile race), I'm knuckling down to a quick & dirty marathon then it's time to hit the 50 milers.

I want to do the Centurion Running 50 Mile Grand Slam this year.  And have a go at a 100 miler.  So let's see what happens!