UNDERGROUND ULTRARUNNING

The start of the year was quite promising. I picked up on the established routine of a runner living in a big city, beating the pavements and roads in my neighbourhood, with some random chances to get out to the nearby woods from time to time. With the month of April came the left calf injury. Not a big issue, it seemed at its early stage. But the seemingly innocent calf tightness developed into a muscle inflammation and then into painful nuisance which sidelined me from a serious training for a couple of weeks. At odds with my preliminary plans, I toed the starting line of my first scheduled race, Valassky Hrb 55 km trail run, the last weekend of May not in a hundered-pro shape. The first 30 km went well, to my surprise. But the next, a bit more hilly part of the trail, played bad with my impaired fitness. I was humbly happy to clock the 17-minute-slower finish time than the year before and to grab the fourth place in my 45+ age category. Anyway, this was just a training race, ...

The first post to this blog won't be about running. It will be about those „empty“ times when you cannot run. When the circumstances out of your will and control stop your trainings, mess with your plans to stock up well on your fitness before your oncoming A-race and prevent you from your natural daily diversion. That happens when you get ill or injured and have enough self-preservation instinct to shelve your running shoes for some time. All of us can testify that these times are more than frustrating. That feeling of a sudden void in our runner´s life cannot be got rid of, no matter what fillers you reach for. These times seem to defy your very essence, they are not a part of you the way you approach yourself. We all live in some sort of a running bubble. Early risings, workday morning runs, weekend long runs. And when the bubble gets a puncture, it sucks. Let's try to approach such moments with your runner's mentality. Do not deplore the situation, embrace it. Wha...