AfterwardsRecovery, numbers and moving on
A Big Bag Of Shoes
I added up the final HAA numbers, returned to Body Leadership Australia with a bag of shoes for donation, and looked forward to a relatively normal parkrun morning.
Friday morning began with a bit of spreadsheet housekeeping. I added the final week’s Strava distances and tried to put a number around what my body had done over the previous four months.
I added the usual warning first. The data wasn’t scientifically accurate. There were manual entries from when the watch ate the GPS data, GPS errors and plenty of operator errors: forgetting to start or stop the watch, accidentally pausing it and all the other things that happened along the way.
When I finished adding everything up, the spreadsheet showed 5,583.2 kilometres, or 1,116.64 parkruns, excluding the parkruns we had actually done along the way.
That total has since been corrected to 5,581.5 km. The old spreadsheet had missed a reconstructed session from Day 61, recorded another day as 65-something instead of 55-something, and had a few cumulative formulas pointing at the wrong cells.
The biggest Monday-to-Sunday week had been 395.6 km. Using a sliding seven-day window, the biggest block came to just over 400 km.
Amazing what the body is capable of, isn’t it?
Then it was back to Body Leadership Australia for some more pain, along with a big yellow bag full of shoes to be donated to Shoes for Planet Earth. Paul and the team had already helped with a donated treatment two days earlier. This visit brought more treatment, advice and a few DIY torture devices to take away.
It also produced a carefully arranged selfie with Paul and his wife Angela, with Angela positioned just high enough for me to finally get a selfie with someone taller than me :)
Later I took the hire car down to the Gold Coast and up to Tamborine Mountain. I love both places, although they have very different settings and vibes. Whenever I am in the area for something like the Gold Coast Marathon, I usually find an excuse to take a detour to Tamborine.
That evening I was thinking about Saturday morning. I planned to walk a relaxed four kilometres to Rocks Riverside parkrun, have a gentle 5 km run and then go for breakfast with friends.
It would be the first time in four months that I wouldn’t be wearing compression tights, a compression shirt and an HAA shirt. I was just going to enjoy parkrun, hang out with positive people and have a good time.
And that’s what parkrun is all about.
Images From The Day
