Pulling Out of the Race

A couple of weeks ago I made a breakthrough with my running and this was about 6 weeks before the scheduled date of my 5k Race For Life. Until then I had been tempted to pull out but my breakthrough had convinced me otherwise. I immediately came up with a little plan of increasing the length of the route I run by 0.5k each week until the race. I used a cool tool called GMaps Pedometer to plot my routes.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to put it into action. The morning I was supposed to go for my first run I was feeling really ill. I phoned in sick to work and went back to bed. I stayed off work for a couple of days then felt a bit better so went back. I planned to try a run again at the weekend. However, my flu-like symptoms developed into a nasty cough and by Saturday morning I couldn't go more than a couple of minutes without coughing up something gross so I skipped the run again.

This cough has persisted for a whole week and all week I've done no exercise whatsoever. Today I have a wedding to go to and then tomorrow morning we go from the hotel to the airport to fly out to France for a week on holiday. I might be able to do some running in France but obviously I can't do my usual route; I have no way of knowing how far I go so it will be haphazard at best.

When I get back I'll have just 3 weeks before the race. If I was to train hard it can be done, anything can be done. But having thought about it, I am simply not willing to put in that much effort in such a short space of time so I am pulling out of the race after all.

I have mixed feelings about this. Firstly I feel a huge burden has been lifted! But of course the downside is that I feel like a failure. My definition of failure is not missing a goal but but quitting on a goal and that's exactly what I have done. However, when I look back over how I arrived at this situation I realise that I have not failed in my physical capacity to run, but in my planning and training. I simply have not trained for this event. I've done a little bit of running here and there; it has been extremely sporadic.

If I was going to continue running I could take it very slowly. I could go for just one or two runs a week and slowly build up the length of the run. If I did this continuously for a whole year I should be able to run 5k quite easily next year and I feel quite confident about that. I haven't quite decided if I want to do that but I have decided to pull out of this year's race.

Oh well, we can't win 'em all :)