I went for a 20km run on a Wednesday. It was the longest run I’ve ever run apparently. I might have done that before because it was not that tough as perhaps I could have been if I’d not done it before.
I set off from the office at 10:30 as per usual. The other guys aren’t as rigid as I am when it comes to routine(or they are more flexible!) and they wanted to go 30 minutes later – I wasn’t having any of that – my mind is a 10:30 kind of mind. That’s how I set it and that;s how it is.
I do find that when I run by myself that I normally have a more exciting run because I switch things up, which they’d be less inclined to. For example the other day I went running with this one guy and I asked if I could take him ‘off-road’ and he agreed enthusiastically and afterwards he said he never wants to run with me again. He got a truck-load of strava achievements. Too bad?.
I don’t like the monotony of the regular ‘loop’ route we run, which is around Victoria park. So it was another opportunity to mix things up again. I decided to look up the map of the area the last time I ran off-road to see where I could go. I saw that there was a couple of parts, I’d I ran past Victoria park, that were grassy and most probably parks and I like running up uneven turf because it makes me feel like I’m a human with legs capable of doing that and not a car just running straights and even altitudes.
I decided to run there or around there abouts.. It was great, everything was new! It was sort of like new frames in a cartoon, I just kept running - it was a page turner. I like running like this. So I just keep waiting for the next scene, as I ran up and down hills, around bushes, seeing new things - mostly along regents canal.
I don’t understand why we’d not run a new route each week all the time.
I didn’t know exactly where I was going but I new that I’d come across large grassy areas and I did. I didn’t how far I was, So I just kept running until something made me stop – either me or something else. As it turns out, that wasn’t me – I’ve got a tough mind, but it was the Thames. I ran all the way to the Thames as the Lime house Basin. Nice to see regents canal become the Thames.
Ran around the Dock. Never been there before, it looked like Katherine’s Dock approaching and for a moment I thought ‘I’ve ran that far?’.
I set back up and I knew that I started to slow down, or that’s what I felt because I was getting tired but it wasn’t that much, but everything got heavy - legs and shoulders. I just keep running at whatever pace I found useful and fairly easy. I got tired but the scenery made me enthusiastic about being there. I find that I find it more enjoyable to run and see something new than keep running even if you’re tired. So I saw different stuff on that way back because I was like ‘ wait, let me run up there, I know I’m tired but I’ll see something new’
I realised on the way out after a while that I’d been running for a long time and I then figured that I’d like to see If I could do 20km, as they would probably be possible because I decided to add the ‘loop’ route also, which would be double what the regular ‘loop’ routes was. Near the end I was tired but it felt ok because It felt that I let off the pedal because I was tired so that allowed me to keep going as I slowed down.
Near the end, I was around 17km and was getting really tired and close to the office, so I needed to run more to reach 20km.
I decided to make multiple detours while watching my distance on my watch until I made the 20km. That means I found new streets that I’d not seen before because I needed to take them to rack up the miles.
It was a good, tiring but really fun run. Doing something unusual is exciting and this proves it. It look me 1.3h and my pace on average was actually not as slow as I thought, considering the extra distance and how tired I was tired at the end. .It was actually only 10 sec’s slower than my last 12-13km. My pace was 4’46. I think I’ll do it again, but I think I’ll do a little more touring.
This is it: