I had a great run today, but this is not directly attributed to listening to ¡Uno!. I don’t think it’s a bad album or anything, it’s pretty tight and polished actually, but I just felt a little bored. There were some fun parts throughout it, and as with all Green Day albums so far, I feel really cool when my feet hit the pavement in time with the downbeat of a song! Green Day songs just seem so fit for the purpose of running, regardless of the pace you are running at.
I had an annoying moment when my headphones kept disconnecting and it drove me wild thinking that I would have to be alone with my breathing sounds and thoughts without a soundtrack! I kept running though, and somehow managed to turn my phone off and on several times and it fixed itself. Such a relief. I ended up running through the whole album and still had a bit to go before I made it home, so I ended up putting my regular, purpose-built running playlist for the last few kms. My favourite track on the album is Rusty James – it’s catchy and I still have the melody circling around in my head.
I just feel so much better now that I am going slower and not caring about it, I can genuinely just keep going for longer now without even realising and it feels great. When I was competing with myself (and hating myself for not being fast enough, quick enough), getting to 3km felt like such a hump, but today, I didn’t even pay attention to how many km I had reached until the album was over and I’d nearly hit 8km. I feel like this has been a HUGE improvement for me, mentally and physically. I just wanted to keep running, and my shin didn’t give me any trouble! I still iced it as soon as I got home though, just to be safe!
Here is my rough running schedule at the moment: my run days are Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday. Tuesdays I’m good for anywhere between 40-60 mins of running. I’m aiming to make Thursday my “long” run, or the one that I try to push out as I work on my endurance and sustainably increasingly my mileage. I’m thinking that if albums aren’t long enough, I might even stack two together and listen to them back to back as I run. I might do that for Dos and Tre this week. My plan for Saturdays is to do my local Parkrun which is a 5km course. I won’t listen to a new album for this, instead, I’ll try to make this my “faster” run, because I’ve read that it’s good to have a balance between quicker short runs and longer ones that build endurance. So for now, while I’m only running 3 days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays will be new album days. Eventually I’d like to work up to running more than 3 days, but I’m also wary of giving my shin a break until it is strong enough that I can push it a bit more. I’ve mentioned before that I do strength training on the days that I don’t run, and I really think it has made a huge difference.
My goal is to comfortably run 5 days a week without panicking about my shin. I don’t want to go through that pain again, it was so awful. For reference, I was limping so badly that my physio joked that he didn’t want me leaving his practice through the front entrance! It hurt all the time, regardless of whether I was moving or not! I did a serious number on it, so I feel like my paranoia now is at least based on some pretty solid evidence.
That’s it! Thanks for sticking around if you have.
Banger Moves 
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