Happily Ever After

Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running

Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.

Ready For A Royal Run

by Russell Turner - 16:30 on 26 April 2024

Recovery from my virtual effort has been gratifyingly swift. My quads were sore on Tuesday, less so on Wednesday, and almost back to normal on Thursday morning, despite a gig the night before. Two 30min walks had passed without incident, so yesterday evening I ventured back into running by joining the Black Isle Runners’ weekly 30min easy jaunt from Fortrose.

This has been well attended in the past, but on the day I was a third of the group (it will increase as the weather improves, I was assured) that made a brief sortie along the old railway line and back. The sometimes muddy route was in reasonable shape, although I had to duck beneath half-fallen trees in a couple of places. Shorter runners had no problem.

The pace was restrained, my quads untroubled; afterwards, I celebrated my latest marathon with a belated Chinese takeaway – it had been closed on Monday. The same day, I received confirmation that my run evidence (a Garmin screenshot) had been ratified by London Marathon HQ and that my medal and shirt will be posted out in due course.

All went so well that I’m now ready to take on at least one of tomorrow’s two Balmoral races for which I signed up some time ago. The 5k starts at 12.30, which gives me time to wake at a sensible time before the two-hour journey to Royal Deeside. Assuming I cross the finish line in around half an hour, that gives me an hour to prepare for the 10k at 2pm. There’s a hill that most people walk, Matchgirl warns me (she’s run the course in the past), but as I’ve no PB pretentions that’s no problem. I won’t even be striving for a sub-60min finish.

That out of the way, on Monday I’ll begin what would be Week 10 of the RTTS schedule – on a week which also features a night in Glasgow to see Jethro Tull, plus three City Limits gigs. Band life is about to get busy again.

There are a couple of faintly pencilled-in 10ks in the diary, but it’s most likely that Balmoral will be my last race day before The Big One in July. I’m looking forward to it.

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