I had a wonderful run this morning. It was hard but it was not as hard as it was on Friday.

It might see hard to qualify what exactly is a good run and what is a bad run. A bad run is where you don't enjoy it, like when you can’t breath or are in pain- that's a sucky feeling. A good run is the absence of all that however it is still hard.

Hard is the sense that you feel you’re straining and stretching your comfort zone without stopping. So your legs gotta be heavy and you need to be tired but not enough to be in pain or to slow down substantially – it a maintainable challenge– i.e. you’ve got to be able to maintain or increase a good pace for the duration of the run – which is hard, especially if its a good pace. When I say a good pace, it mean a good pace for me which is around 4:30 give and take a bit.

A bad run is like you just want to stop.

So with that “expert” break down on what’s a good run and and bad run for me – here is the run:

Actually I remember one other thing about a “good” run – you feel that you are running faster than usual and you’re not feeling the effects that would normally be felt (like greater fatigue, leg soreness or being out of breath).

Today was a hard run. It wasn’t painful and I didn’t dislike the run. It was just difficult and hard and perhaps a good way of saying it is that it was an uncomfortable but with wilful effort, and because of that I’m rather pleased with it. But did I say it was tough? yeah it was. So anyway what did occur to me was that I was really tired and my legs were heavy and I push just continually pushing. At it happens I pushed myself to an achievement.

I could hardly get into or out of bed yesterday. My quads had stiffened up. I was like my muscles had solidified and every single movement was pretty much excruciating. Lets not even talk about going up stairs or down them. Sitting down to watch T.V on my sofa was a special kind of terror.

I said to myself at one point laughingly – “You can do this, ‘cmon, you’re a machine… a machine just in need of some oil”. The reason I have DOMS is because I’m just back from holiday and I did a leg workout a few days ago and basically my body just said, “woah, dude take it easy – we didn’t talk about this…”. When I arrived back I also did a back workout and the same thing. I figured I’d try and get a back message for that – that didn’t help. So no point trying a massage for my quads.

So I woke up about every 2-3 hours last night to test if my legs had “healed” because I’m running to work today – it my run day. Each time I tried to flex in my bed or roll over on my side, my legs tensed up and it hurt like nobody’s business and I knew that this hadn’t fixed itself. The question I asked myself was should I (could I?) run to work this morning.(I ask myself a lot of questions between 5am and 6am usually). My body said pretty clearly “No, that’s a stupid idea – don’t be an idiot”.

I decided to do it anyway – that was a hard decision. I set of at about 06:30 into the dark blackness or the morning. I did a bit of stretching before hand and found that that helped me..walk and jogging on the spot(dynamic stretching) made it easier to move my legs.

When I started, It hurt a bit but it eased up and I was pretty surprised because of the previous pain that I’d experienced getting in/out of bed. It wasn’t completely gone but it had significantly decreased so that I could run! I could still feel my tender quads though. I ran the complete distance of 10+km to work and it was fine. It was fine – I felt my legs a bit sore all through the run but it wasn’t sore enough like before to stop the running action – which I continued all the way. I’m impressed. Sure I didn’t run fluidly, I just gradually flowed through the range of running leg motions though it had more resistance(expected!) than had I not had sore quads – but I could run and run was what I wanted to do. It was like my legs got oil during the run and got better.

You *can* run with DOMS. Its a little tougher than usual but you’ll get there…

My DOMS was pretty intense and I could still run.