Giving in and taking a break

[ewt]

My ankle got better, then I had a week of quite bad general joint pain, then I had moving house to contend with. I'm still moving, and my running stuff is not all in one place as a result, and I have more services than usual to prepare for.

I'd like to get back to running, but realistically this is probably going to have to wait until January. I'm struggling not to mentally berate myself over this, but I think I will be even worse if I tell myself that of course I can keep going/restart now, and then fail to do it because the logistics are silly.

A disadvantage of walking until I feel warmed up (rather than for a set amount of time), and walking/stretching between running intervals until the shin pain goes below a certain level, is that I never know exactly how long a session will take; that makes it harder to fit in, even with my fairly flexible and variable schedule.

I think I will try for twice a week in January, though: stretches and/or extra time between running intervals seems to do more for the shin pain than only running once a week did.

Comments

[rmc28]

It sounds like a sensible decision, and I think it can be very powerful to give yourself permission not to do something until a particular date.

I look forward to reading about your twice-weekly runs in January!

[liv]

Making a plan to start again in January sounds like a really good idea. I've definitely found that when I break new habits, setting myself a specific date when I'm going to start again works a lot better than just telling myself I should start now. If the circumstances that made me break the habit are still there, all that happens is that I end up feeling bad because I wanted to start again and didn't make it, and that spirals to the point where the whole thing has a huge weight of guilt and I just never want to do it at all.

We'll still be here in January :-) Even if I manage to finish the official C25K programme next week, which is my plan, I am intending to keep going until I can actually get to 5 km in 30 minutes (as opposed to 3.5 ish).