When is a niggle not a niggle? When you re-frame it.

Today was my first time out since Thursday morning and I'm not too happy about it. I wish that there was some great and interesting reason for this, like alien abduction or winning the lottery, but there isn't; it just so happens that running on Wednesday irritated my left knee without me even realising. The following day then heightened my awareness of "the niggle" without exactly aggravating it and so Friday and then Saturday got scrubbed. This morning, well, I felt unmotivated and also a little scared; there's nothing worse than taking a niggle and turning it into a full-blown injury.

That said I did want to have something to write about here and so I decided that an easy test run might be a good idea. Where better to head off too than Finsbury Park then since most of the route is along the Parkland Walk - a decommissioned railway line of gentle gradient and delightful prospect:

 

To be honest though my heart wasn't really in it and for the first 5-10 minutes my thoughts revolved about just getting through the next hour and no more than that. Then, for no better reason than that I had to perform some fancy footwork to avoid the mud in Highgate Woods, I suddenly realised that it could be better than this. If I just lifted my knees a bit, enjoyed the sunshine breaking through and concentrated on enjoying myself then maybe it would be alright; and the funny thing is that it worked! I forgot about my knee and the missed training and focused on looking around and smiling at other runners (well not too much; this is London after all and everyone's a potential psycho!). Soon enough I was down at Finsbury Park, skipping around the perimeter and knocking lost balls back to kids enjoying a kick-about: 

Heading back is perhaps my favourite part of the route - a 2-mile uphill section, traffic-free and sprinkled with other runners to chase. With my positive frame of mind I was raring to go and started at a pace decent enough to reel in several runners and a couple of cyclists by the top; even better my mile pace of 6:52 going up the hill was better than my pace of 6:58 going down! Truly I was in the zone and as I made my final turn home I marvelled at how I could just run on forever; my feet didn't hurt, I wasn't tired and I just plain felt good. The power of the mind eh?

Obviously I'm not fixed (as I sit here typing my knee is not exactly painful but it is uncomfortable) but I'm not so broken that I have to stop running and that's a relief. Also obvious is the fact that I'm not the first person to benefit from re-framing an experience and, as it happens, the whole idea of "you are what you think you are" was brought home to me only yesterday in this excellent audio recording: Earl Nightingale Speech.

Now I know that the guy speaking here is prehistoric and that there is rather more religion and reference to how great the ol' US of A is in this recording than I would like but even so I think that he's saying something very important here: If you act like the thing that you want to become and put it to the forefront of your thoughts, night and day, then inevitably you will achieve whatever that goal is. Heck writing it down like that makes it sound like the worst case of self-help advice but then again it allowed me to have one of my best workouts in a long while today. Makes you think.

Distance: 9.4 miles

Time: 1h 14m 09s