Disappointment

Last week they announced that were was going to be a Bristol Marathon late this year, which got me interested, however on the same day that I learned of it they cancelled it. Hopefully they will plan one for the coming year as they had a lot of applicants for this one.

I had been thinking it would be good to do the Swindon Half-Marathon, which would be the 9th of October, however the recovery process from the Bristol Half is taking longer than I had hoped. I had read somewhere that recovery from a running event is roughly a day for every mile of the distance, which in this case would be almost two weeks. I hadn't thought it would take that long, seeing as I recovered from a high tempo nine mile training run in just a few days previous to the event, and also the twelve mile distance run in a similar time frame, but it seems that those last few miles at race pace - and running on a hard surface - really do make all the difference.

General aches and pains went away within a couple of days, but when I have been out for easy runs recently I still got muscle fatigue a lot earlier. When running this morning this was a bit better, but my movements didn't seem to have any fluencey, so I guess I still have a few more days to get back to normal. I say all this, but since the Half I do seem to have acquired a very specific (though not particularly painful) issue with walking barefoot, and am now wondering whether I've given myself a stress fracture. I'll see what my GP says this afternoon...

Last night I had my second game of the chess season. I played a fine game and achieved an excellent position (you can guess what's coming, right?), then blew it in a single move. I guess I got careless, certainly for some of my moves in retrospect I wasn't properly considering all my opponents forcing reply moves, which should be a minimum. Win at strategy + lose at tactics = lose the game. You can find it analysed below.

Play chess online

The team score ended up at 3-3, but our losses were i - my stupid one move loss, ii - a default loss due to not having a 6th player, iii - one of our players mobile phones going off when they were in a piece up won position.

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Since writing the above entry I have seen my GP. They didn't think it was likely to be a stress fracture due to a lack of inflammation (and thought a strain, e.g. to a ligament, was more likely), but said I should avoid any running/racquet sports etc. for at least a couple of weeks, and come back if the problem persisted. So that's good news (I had started to get images of x-rays, toe splints, special hard soled shoes, not being able to run for many months...etc!), but I think I can rule out the Devils Aquathlon and Swindon Half-Marathon. Hopefully it will have resolved in the next few weeks, in which case my next event could be the Bath Hilly Half Marathon in late November, or possibly the Christmas Cracker 10k run in mid December.