The First Run Back

So, on the 1st of April 2025 I officially began ultramarathon.life and went out for my first run. It felt good to be moving again, and I had fun trying to work out how to film myself running (see below for the results).

The next day was not so great, I woke up at 7 am in a not unsubstantial amount of pain. I crawled upstairs, found some painkillers, and went back to bed. Had I been less lazy, I would have filmed a fantastic video of me struggling around. But by the time I finally dragged myself out of bed for the day, I was a bit stiff, but not entertainingly broken.

Still, running 14.6 km around a lake in 1 hour and 33 minutes for my first run back might have been ambitious and derailed my training for the week. So after the Tuesday run, Wednesday and Thursday were mostly written off other than a little stretching. Friday was overloaded with work and Saturday was spent at a meditation retreat. This left me having to scrabble around to do only my second training session of the week on Sunday, but first, if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video…

Sunday Smoke

So it wasn’t bad running weather in some ways, a bit cloudy, only 20-something degrees… but the air pollution was brutal today.

I have run in temperatures in the mid-30’s and I’ve run in the snow. I’ve run in sleet, rain, hail and fog, in the midday summer sun and the dead of a crisp November night. But these are the only environmental conditions that have really stopped me running. I’ve tried running in this sort of pollution before and was coughing for days afterwards. So, instead of a run, I had to make do with a strength session instead.

All good, I needed to strengthen my glutes in particular, and my hamstrings also needed a bit of TLC. An hour or so of squats, single-leg Romanian deadlifts, glute bridges, deadbugs, birddogs and whatever else I felt like was a good workout and probably what my body needed more than the run.