One last lap of the track season

My training hit a small bump in the road, so I spent the weekend watching running, rather than actually running

Norway’s running rock star Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

On my run on Friday, hot, late morning, running through a wood about 6km in, I suddenly felt sick. Maybe the neck of my T-shirt was too tight, I thought. I rarely wore this T-shirt. I stopped for a moment and it passed, and I carried on. Up the last hill to my house, however, a wave of nausea came over me. I stopped again. What was it? I wasn’t exactly pushing hard, I’d only done about 10km. I gathered myself and ran home.

A few hours later I was sick.

Until that run, I’d been slightly obsessing over my Strava weekly mileage graph, which had been growing into a pleasingly gradual upward curve over the last six weeks or so. It was so neat and positive. Back on the rise!

The sickness brought it all crashing down. My running. My work. My family duties. I had to give in and collapse into bed.

Which wasn’t ideal as my eldest daughter, Lila, was off to university for the first time on Sunday. I roused myself enough to accompany her on the start of her new journey, but only just, barely able to help her even carry her bags to the car, and sitting collapsed in the back seat as Marietta drove the whole way to London.

On the way, I dozily scanned Twitter, catching glimpses, between all the hot takes on Russell Brand, of some impressive performances going down at the Diamond League final in Eugene. Was the athletics season still going? Even I was beginning to lose interest.

Lila’s university halls it turned out were in a sea of tower blocks in Stratford, and it all felt a little glum looking out of her window over an abandoned lorry park on a grey wash of a day. Pathetic fallacy, they call it in literature. It all felt a long way from the idyllic summer haze of south Devon. At least in my mind.

Still, she unpacked, buckled up, and by the time we were home that evening we’d received a text that she’d met a bunch of people and was already settling in and having fun. Hiccup overcome already.

I checked Twitter one last time before collapsing back into bed, and read a tweet from an athletics writer I respect, Steven Mills, who wrote: “This has to be one of the greatest days of athletics in history … virtually every single event has been phenomenal!”

Huh? I guess I had to check it out after reading that.

So apologies to those of you who don’t give two figs about track running and come here to read about my struggles in epic ultra marathons. Some weeks life gives you a little hiccup, and there’s not much else to say. While at the same time athletics has one of it’s “greatest days”. So let me give you a brief rundown of how it looked to me when I logged on this morning and watched the action in delay.