Giving It Another Go

   According to my Garmin, the last time I ran in earnest was March 27. So, give or take a day or two, I have not run in two whole months.
   The hardest part about this realization is that I had very few reasons not to. A couple of little physical hiccups kept me off the road for what only needed to be brief periods of time but the reality of it is that I have simply not felt like running and nothing much was really going to force me to get out there. Yes, I have been feeling guilty about this.
   So today I got out and ran. Technically you could call it running only because it didn't fit the "walking" definition. I ran as slow as I possibly could because the only goal for today was to run. A dedicated speedwalker would have passed me.
   About half a kilometer into it, I developed a sharp pain in my right knee. This kind of popped up out of nowhere and I was a little perplexed as to its cause. Then I remembered---the infamous "falling down the stairs" episode about a week ago. You can read about it here, chronicled in my "other" blog. It had nothing to do with running so that's where it went. At the rate I have been falling down the stairs lately, I could probably start my own blog dedicated to falling down, but that's a whole other story.
   Because of the knee pain, my run at least momentarily turned into a walk. After a short walk, the pain seemed to have disappeared and I returned to slow running.
   It was a beautiful and sunny day today, temps around 25C (77F) and was the warmest weather I'd been running in since last summer. My original plan had been to run the usual 5K route I'm accustomed to but, because of the knee pain, I changed my plans and decided instead to head for Warbler Woods and maybe shorten things up a bit.

Love all the little flowers lining the trail.

   The last time I'd been in the woods was early Spring and none of the leaves were out yet. Today, however, nothing but greenery! Really should have taken a few more pics but at this point I was more in survival mode. I was forcing myself to run up the hills in the woods and there are a fair amount of them.
   At one point I ran into a woman who was hiking who said she was having a hard time handling the hills walking, she couldn't imagine running up them. Told her I'd be walking again in a minute and she'd probably catch up to me.
   Unfortunately, the people who run the parks here in London have closed off the section of trail I normally run on, so that it can "regenerate". I guess this is good for  Warbler in the long run but it does kind of screw me up....

New boardwalks!

   Before I knew it, I was out of the woods and back to sidewalks again and back home again for a 4K run/walk.

This was obviously a checkpoint...

   It always feels like starting all over again every time I'm away from running for an extended period and then start up again. It's times like these that I find myself remembering what it was like back in the old "Learn To Run" days, when I could barely run for two minutes straight. This makes me feel a little better...
   Hopefully, I'll be able to get out a little more regularly now and not spend so much time procrastinating and rationalizing. As hard as the work was today, it sure felt good!