Week 8: Gel Hell

Lesson of the week: Water and carbohydrate/glucose energy gels are your friend. But it does seem a bit strange effectively running for an hour only to add the calories you have just burned to your body in order to keep going. Why would anyone do this? Unless they had to run a certain distance? Unless they were mental? Unless someone actually enjoys running? Do people enjoy running? Who are these people? I don’t know the answer to this question.

Maybe we should start making our own energy gels out of whisked baked beans, mashed potato, treacle and eggs? And we could drink them out of knitted socks rather than plastic.

Anyway last week was a monster. The big Sunday run was for 18 miles. 18 MILES. 18 MILES. Like the film 8 Mile with Eminem but with an extra 10 miles worth of rapping, gritty urban realism and street dance added on. It took 2 HOURS 35 MINUTES. This was a strange run. One man in running socks got into a weird stag like overtaking race at about 14 miles, but this may have been a hallucination such was the state of me by the end of the run (this would explain why he decided to fly the final 2 miles). In fact was it me; the man in the running socks. It wasn’t. Don’t threaten me. I’m a panther. Meh.  

This week, after the usual depressingly pitch black, windswept, rained on, honked at, headlighted, bike avoiding weekday evening sweatfests we have a 2 HOUR 50 MINUTE run on Sunday, this could potentially border on 20 MILES if we go for it. Power socks and sick bags at the ready!