Listening to your body (when it's screaming at you)
I'm on the injury bench at the moment. I've got a hip sprain. (At least, I'm hoping it's just a sprain.) There's nothing I can do for now except keep stretching, icing and resting it out. A running friend made a very perceptive point last week. Like me, she's been running two years now and she has noticed the difference between her first year as a runner and her second year. In the first year anything goes. The sheer novelty of it carries you through. Everything feels like an achievement. In your second year, you start to expect bigger things of yourself. Inevitably you compare yourself to others, you try to determine where you ought to be by now, what you should be doing next. In short, it becomes a lot less enjoyable. I think this has happened to an extent with me. This year I think I kind of lost the point of running. For years before I took up running, I'd been in a bad place mentally. The old saying, '...