Toes are important

When I started this blog about my little dream to run the Great Wall Marathon, I thought this process would be about how normal people (non-athletes like me) experience this process. I know the word athlete is a bit generic, but whatever it means to you... I am not one. I found though that as time marched on, that some of the blogging is me writing about coping with the training, while some of this is me just sharing, but a lot of this is me recording this path and in the process this has become a bit of a diary.

A week or so ago, I wrote about my favourite things, amongst those I mentioned, my training partners. This past weekend my training partner had an accident. On Saturday, in a freak accident at home, one of my precious partners lost his big toe and broke multiple bones (mostly toes) in his right foot.  Drama, hospital, doctors and some more drama. Now that the dust has settled, I reflect and suddenly felt lonely.

The first thoughts were to deal with the actual incident and get the medical stuff sorted. After all of that, I had to face the facts: How much I relied on the companionship and the co-motivation. And generally, having a guy run with you just makes you feel safer. This week, I am faced with taking care of an injured toe-less wonder and having to deal with a changed picture of how I am going to get to the 19th of May in good enough condition to run this thing. It's not impossible, but life can be so fickle. I know the loss of a toe is a bigger problem than my "loss of training partner" and there is no "but" really that can be said without feeling really crappy about saying it. Maybe there is only a "how". How do I adjust the training plan; how do I alter my training schedule to accommodate all of this, how do I not slip.

It is simple - less enjoyable, but simple.

I need to start using races as training for the longer runs (already entered a 21.1km on Sunday and ran the Run Jozi) - tick. To deal with the immediate problem of increasing the distances: I need to dust of the old iPod and start running those shorter runs on my own again.

No problems here (I hope).

So first stumbling block: my dog chewed my iPod this morning sigh :-) luckily only damaged was the headphones.