Is it time for a rest yet......

A tough week, walked home all 5 nights (that's 50 miles), 35 miles on Saturday morning and 3 hours of humping concrete and rubble into a skip, no running/walking on Sunday but10 hours in the car too and from Wales, Monday morning was up early for physio and then a day moving bottling machine, safes, tables from a sub and other equally heavy objects. thankfully today is a rest day, not that it has been restfull, did a Arctic gear check tonight and gave the sled the once over which is just as well as one of replacement bits has the hole drilled in the wrong place and needs to be redrilled.
Good news from the physio, my legs and joints have started to point in the right direction, their is still a lot of streching to be done but she said in just a week their is a noticable difference, and to be honest the i can feel the difference....

There is a god

and her name is Fran and she's a NHS physio, OK she may not have obtained god like status just yet but she is the first person to actually listen to me and try and understand my various points of pain and discomfort.
Within a couple of minutes of stretching and twisting she noted that my pelvis/hips were out of alinement's by half an inch, this apparently can been fixed by just pulling it back into place!! which is exactly what she did....further twisting and stretching highlighted the quite alarming difference in flexibility between my left and right leg. So the focus of the next week is stretching and lots of it, i have a series of 10 stretches to do as often as physically possible.
I always suspected that i didn't do enough stretching relative to the amount of running/walking i do, but i was as shocked as Fran at the degree of inflexibility in my legs and hips/pelvis.

A strange old week....

After the back to back 32 milers of the weekend Monday i was greeted with 3" of snow and a very long day at work, managed a quick 8 miles on Tuesday, Wednesday was another long day, Thursday i had to go to Covent Garden so walked back to Leytonstone which was about 10 miles, again it snowed it was odd to walk through central London with the snow settling everywhere....Saturday was a tough old day did 18 miles, the first 10 miles were easy but the last 8 my body just seemed to shutdown by the time i got home everything was hurting and to honest i was in considerable discomfort for the rest of the day, Sunday i seemed to recover and after working i walked the 10 miles home without any problems. I have the first of my NHS physio appointments on Monday morning so will see what they can suggest.

A free concert, £40, oh and 64 miles....

Another chilly training weekend in London, the highlight was undoubtedly while walking the Thames path i stumbled across Kelly Jones (for the uneducated of you Kelly Jones is the lead singer of one of the biggest (and in my opinion best!) bands in the world - The Sterophonics) recording some sort of video on the side of the Thames unfortunately for me it was one song done in one take and he was off, it's always good to come into some extra money but £40 was a little unexpected, some poor runner somewhere will be kicking themsleves for dropping it, on the training front it was a good weekend 64 miles over 2 days (back to back 32 milers) 2 early starts to get me over south west London before i walk right accross London back to Loughton...

snow snow and more snow

For the second time in the last few weeks London has ground to a halt due to the amount of snow!! but believe it or not the snow plays havoc in training for the Arctic!!, the snow only lasts for a few hours before it turns into a sheet of ice making any sort of training just plain dangerous. I'm sure the enforced rest is doing me a favour but it just doesn't feel like it, it's times like this when i wish i still had some sort of gym membership.

Now thats an unusal sight in london - a pack of hyena

A chilly 42 miler, it has to be said that the Paddington branch of the Grand Union canal is the scummiest bit of canal I've ever seen, dead animals/dog mess/rubbish all the way into Little Venice it just plain horrible, it got a bit better once it becomes the Regent Canal which passes through the middle of London Zoo, so at one point i had exotic birds on one side of me and a pack of Hyena on the other!!, i carried on through Camden and onto Victoria park, then it was onto the River Lea and on to home, felt very good and decided to run the last 5 miles which was remarkably easy :-)
It was good to catch up with a number of people taking part in the T2T race and i walked the first 6 miles with Tricia, Steph and Rach, Perks and Matt from the www.themds.co.uk they appeared to have an equally dull walk up the Grand union canal to Tring.