Recover, recover and recover

After last Sunday's longer than expected trek through the countryside I've been a bit waylaid this week! Luckily it only took a couple of days for my right knee to ease off, along with my major muscle groups, but that's not been my biggest problem: even now, as I sit here, my right ITB is complaining and tender and this is five days later. What's most annoying though is that I had intended to take in Lotte's freshly-created TriLondon track session in Regents Park this evening and work on my speed but that was a definite no-no. Instead I came home with the intention of heading out to Highgate Woods for maybe 45 minutes and a few easy laps.

Well in the first few minutes even this felt like a tall order! My knee hurt, as did my shins and also, not to forget, my ITB. Maybe it'd be easier describing the bits of me that didn't hurt? Believe it or not even my palms are sore from spiking the lawn on Tuesday. If this is old-age I want to get a refund! Anyway I stumbled around the woods and formulated a plan - today would be a good day to fool around by jogging up a few hills because, for some reason, this wasn't painful! So I crossed over to Queens Wood since this has a most wonderful U-valley shape with a kind of bowl at one end and this means only one thing: lots of hills. At first I figured that if I got to 30 minutes I'd be happy and go home but then a funny thing happened; I was having so much fun that 45 minutes sneaked past and then I started to think that maybe I should just stick around for the whole hour, going up and down and around about the woods:

Queens Wood - round and round

Yes that really is a plot of my route! I was having so much fun exploring all of the little paths that I covered pretty much every inch of the wood and I've never done that before. So maybe there is a silver-lining to being injured? OK my ITB still aches but other than that I felt good during my little excursion and, moreover, I feel refreshed from having larked around with no aim other than to keep moving those legs. Sometimes that's enough.

Distance: 7.6 miles

Time: 1h 2m 52s