Intercity 126

Distance: 800m
Crawl: 32 lengths

Distance: 1.73 miles
Time: 20m01s

Sports massage: painful
Time: 30 minutes

It's Monday, it's lunchtime, so that's a swim then. My normal recovery session. The pool seems as busy as ever, so I venture into the laned-off area as usual now that I'm good enough to not get too much in the other swimmers' way. I still got overtaken a lot, but on the whole I barely rested between lengths.

Then after work, a gentle 20 minute recovery run. What's a recovery run? Very very slow? Running very slow feels awkward and uncomfortable. I'll run at a slow comfortable pace then. I managed to keep it down to over 11 minutes a mile, which is my slowest run this month. A success there then. That brings my monthly total to 126 miles. That's like running from Oxford to Hastings¹.

And to finish the day a reward of a sports massage to iron out any muscular problems from yesterday's 18-miler. It started off really well. My calves seem to be in good shape, and even my achilles which was a bit sore this time last week seems ok now. Then hamstrings. Ouch! Why did they get so crunchy? Was my faster pace yesterday to blame? Probably. Then quads. OUCH! Oh well, as I explained to the therapist, I don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth unless she hurts me. How she manages to find how to hurt a muscle that felt perfectly ok until she stuck her elbows into it though...

¹ I couldn't find another city that's 126 miles away from Oxford, but intercity-and-town doesn't have the same ring to it.