No Excuses is one of my favourite Alice in Chains songs. What a tune it is. Of course, you didn’t come to this blog to hear my whimsical thoughts on early 90s grunge music right? Have I told you about Temple of the Dog yet?
But, no excuses is my theme for the week. If you have been following the last few blogs you will know I have some work related travel on over the coming month. I was in Dublin Mon-Thu this week. When I say Dublin I mean Blanchardstown. Which is about 10k from Dublin City centre.
Monday morning before flying over I jumped up early and squeezed a Tak in. Number 72. No excuses. I need to get them done. And then a nice recovery run in Dublin that evening.
No excuses for the long run. I had 48k to do on Thursday. A change to the work diaries meant a need to change the plan. I moved the long run forward a day to Wednesday. That meant after being in office and then a post work meal Tuesday, a day that went from 0800-2100, I was up at 4am to do the long run. A porridge pot and cereal bar later and at 4:29am I was doing a loop of just over 4k 11x to get my run done.
Why a loop? Well, I forgot that I would need a head torch at that time of the morning so I decided to simplify the run. I had planned on hitting Phoenix Park and the back along the Royal canal, looping around the park a bit. It would be too dark for that though. No headtorch? No excuses. Get the run done.
48k would take me around 3:45 at decent pace and I had a catch up at 8:30am with a work colleague over breakfast. Made it back in time for a lovely omelette and catch up. No excuses.
The next fly in the ointment came on Saturday. I was planning on doing a 2 hour run with a parkrun effort.
The fly was the human equivalent of musical Thunderbirds announcing a tour and tickets on sale Saturday. To be 100% clear. If Oasis were playing in my garden I would shut the curtains and hope the Everest windows did their job. But… I offered to get some tickets for mates.
That meant I had to be home for 0900. So, I did Tak 73, and then hurtled down for a 5k tempo. It is a great way to condition the quads. It is funning when I look at the splits, I got faster as the 5k went on, and as the hill flattens out. And that is a measure of how much I struggle to really let go on a descent. I ran the 5k in 16:30. This is a Strava PB but is as about as honest as Oasis tweeting that they will clamp down on touts selling above face value but allowing Ticketmaster to apply dynamic pricing.
No excuses tho. I got out of Saturday what I wanted and as I write this on Sunday after a good strong stretching session I can feel that downhill thrash out more than I felt the 30 miler on Wednesday. That is a good sign.
In fact, potential excuses turned into opportunities. I squeezed in two Taks. Saw 5 beautiful sunrises. Ran a fake 5k PB. Hit the quad conditioning hard. I got a really good loop practice run done. My recovery running was with colleagues from Texas, Arizona, Berlin and Shanghai.
As the first line of No Excuses goes: it’s alright.
James Stewart 