Back to back to backs

Day to day
My left knee injury is holding up as I start to increase my mileage back up to 2012 levels.  I have now finished an easy going 'back to marathon fitness' phase of my training.  I followed this with a couple of easy weekends and it is now time to restart back to back runs.  If all goes well after the first back to back 'hard' weeks of back to backs I will start to enter some ultras.  I am hoping there will still be places for the Ultra Brecon 50.

There is no doubt that my knee injury is still there, but reducing my stride length seems to have kept things from flaring up. I do seem to be running quite a bit more slowly than I used to.  I am not yet sure whether this is due to the change in stride length, age related decline or the lack of any speed work for a good while.  As my confidence in the knee increases I have now rescheduled some speed work back into my training.  A 10k lunch break pace session and a couple of other fast short runs didn't seem to do any harm.

The fast runs were run without orthoses in what, these days, would be described as 'minimalist' or 'barefoot' footwear or what runners of my vintage would call 'shoes'.  This is not to say that my physio's warnings were wrong, my shortened stride and the shoe type more or less preclude heel landing and consequent foot rolling.  However, the reason I have shortened my stride is not to prevent over pronation, it is because hyper extension of my knee hurts in real time.  Especially, shock following an over extended landing, i.e. jarring a foot when the knee is more than straight, causes excruciating pain and is probably the cause of past 'flare ups'.


Lighter evenings
It is still pretty dark for most of my longer midweek run, though there is some light in the sky for the first three miles now.  It has been fun navigating new extensions by head torch.

Some light in the sky now, though this is still early in my evening run.  Wedgwood monument Old Hill, Bignall End.

I cover some of the same ground in daylight on rest weekends.  I am getting to the point where I have to carry reading glasses for navigation, so I was surprised that my eye was caught by fungi only about 10mm across the other Sunday.  Apparently these are Scarlet Elf Cups, Sarcoscypha austriaca.  When I got closer I found more and larger fruiting bodies though the colour was not so good as those shown.

Bright red fungus, larger associated growths were not quite so intense in colour.

I tend to enjoy my midweek long run all through the year now.  Buying a head torch good enough to use off road must be one of the best decisions I have ever made.  I was starting to have serious motivational problems as a result of having to use routes lit by street lights.  I bought a Silva Trail Runner, the extra downward shining LEDs are a nice touch and I find it works well for me.  The Li ion rechargeable model wasn't made when I bought mine.  I have the old four AA cell waist belt type which I use with 2500 mAh rechargeable batteries.