Lack of patience

A wintry looking evening at Terrigal when I went for a short
evening walk

I haven't been able to feel any pain from my calf strain for the last five days, either walking or running (though my chronic right heel problem bothers me most of the time), but have stuck to my plan of increasing my running distance by one kilometre each day.

My base fitness should be good, given the last six months of fairly steady training, but even on these very short jogs I have been feeling unfit.  My heart rate has been barely going above 120bpm and my quads feel stiff and leaden.  It's probably all mental, but that matters too.

Potato chips were few and far between for the larine residents

I feel like I need to snap out of it, with Bogong to Hotham just a month away, but worry that the weakness in my calf is still there even though I can't feel it.  Today my impatience got the better of me, and though I stuck to the planned 5km run (plus a few kilometres of walking), I stepped up the pace with the goal of getting my heart rate a little higher and my legs moving faster.  I survived unscathed running the last 3km under 5:00/km pace and the last under 4:30/km, without really straining.  Pushing it up the last hill, I did wonder what I would tell myself if the calf tore at that point and whether I should quit while I was ahead, but I ran through to the end safely.

I can't say that the calf problem is behind me, and it probably isn't, but I needed a circuit-breaker to get my confidence up a little.  If there's no follow-up pain on tomorrow's easier 6km, I might try running the whole of the Trotters' 14km "Woody's Wun" on Saturday, but non-competitively.