Getting back in to the rhythm

For anyone who's ever studied sports science you'll know that there is an acronym, S.P.O.R.T which lays out the principles of fitness training.

Over the first week and a half of my 5k a day challenge, one of these principles has caused me a great deal of pain and frustration.

The letters of the acronym stand for specificity, progression, overload, reversibility and tedium and the one that's been troubling me is reversibility.

If you've ever reached a level of fitness and then stopped training for any reason, whether it be injury or laziness, you'll be fully aware that when you start training again your body plays a bit of a cruel trick on you. Painfully quickly you'll come to the realisation that what you were once able to do, you no longer can.

Last year I ran my first half and full marathons, to do this I was running 3 or 4 times a week, between 10 and 40 km. So when I set myself this challenge to run 5 km every day in 2016, I thought physically it would be fairly straight forward.

However, after a couple of months without running regularly, running 5 km again has felt like a massive test on my stamina. As well as the physical effects, this has a big mental impact too. It's hard for you to accept that what used to be a pretty standard run,
is now absolute agony.

But along with trying to raise money for Rethink, getting back on the road and pushing myself mentally and physically over the course of the this year was part of my motivation and this is the first hurdle I've got to overcome.