December Challenge

 

Lillsjön, Kungsängen, on the last day of November 2022

Looking back, after this autumn's ultras I was pretty spent, both mentally and physically. Mentally, because the longer races hadn't quite gone as I had hoped, and I'd found the last 30-40km in both pretty miserable. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, and I'd lost a bit of purpose, and most definitely motivation. And looking back, also physically - the legs felt pretty tired on what should be 'easy' runs, and I wasn't hitting any usual paces. Switching to play football for a couple of months actually made a lot of sense, except for the fact that physiologically, I just couldn't handle it - it was almost comical the 5 minutes I took to tear my calf (sniper!) after coming on as a sub. 

My football days - celebrating scoring a goal for Långholmen FC with Chris Allen, back in 2009 

So I've been waiting really to find a motivation to get out running again, and build up a bit of momentum in my training. I'm going to try and see if I can complete a challenge that I did back in 2020 and seemed to work well then (mind you, it was Covid times....) which is to run between 1 and 31 km on each day of December. Not in order mind you (as that leaves you with 286km in the final week!), but deciding every day which distance I will run (which also makes the whole process a bit more tactical and a bit more fun). 

As mentioned above, back in 2020 we were still in the depths of Covid, so there were no parkruns on Saturday mornings, and in general things were still pretty quiet at work, so there was plenty of time free for running. This time around I'll think I'll have to fit in more evening runs, more doubles, and try and top up the mileage that way. Started yesterday with 13km in the bank, out on the Lennartsnäs peninsula, a place where I love to run. Today I'm visiting Falun on a parkrun mission, so there will be a few kms here and there, but probably not much distance. Playing catch-up already! We'll see how it goes.