Well I have to admit that 2018 has been pretty poor from a running perspective for me with today marking the day I finally hit 200 miles for the year after months of what turned out to be unnecessary resting from not just running but pretty much anything. From late March until late June I followed the traditional advice of rest, ice, compression and elevation in an ultimately vain attempt to fix my broken knee, my life became a depressing cycle of feeling my knee degenerate as each working week progressed, feeling it improve while I rested on my ‘weekends’ 
before repeating the cycle again. It left me with cabin fever and a frustration that I wasn’t really living the life I expected as I usually get out and about quite a bit on my days off and keep as active as possible (unsurprising for a runner!). Finally at the end of June I met my NHS physio for the first time and he diagnosed the issue fairly swiftly before uttering the words I’d longed to hear, ‘I want you to get back to your normal running routine’. I was absolutely overjoyed to hear that as at my lowest ebb I had thought this was the end of my running days or I was at least looking at months off. It turns out that the injury was caused by a sudden lack of running, which is frustrating to say the least, I had initially stopped running for around a month following some tightness in the area where I had hernia surgery last year but the knee pain developed soon afterwards and I opted to keep resting (to little avail) as described earlier. So here we are three weeks into my recovery and things are going good, I’m keeping up with the exercises I’ve been given to strengthen my glutes although I should be doing them anyway regardless of the injury and I’ve got out for eleven runs so far with a total mileage of just over fifty miles and it just had to be that my recuperation has coincided with a period of renovation at my local gym plus the longest 
heatwave since 1995, nevertheless I’m determined to get out there and follow the orders of my physio while at the same time staying hydrated and just concentrating on building distance and not worrying about times and pace etc which will of course come in the fullness of time. Having said that due to my work pattern at the moment my runs are generally early-mid afternoon when the sun is at it’s hottest but last week a restless night resulted in heading out at 4.30 am for a wonderful fresh sunrise run along the coast. Today I hit nine miles for the first time which means I might just book a place at my local big race in October, the ten mile Great South Run, we shall see however as I’m really not interested in giving myself any targets until my next physio appointment in two weeks. 
For now my knee is definitely improving but it’s by no means fixed yet so I’ve still got another month probably of slowly getting back to my previous regime and hopefully at least some of that will be in slightly more comfortable temperatures! It’s definitely been a very challenging first half of 2018 and it has reminded me again of the close link between my running and my mental health, there have been some very dark days where I thought I’d never run again and I was past my best but I now look forward in the knowledge that the best is yet to come provided I can be patient, build up slowly and remember to stretch those glutes etc!
Suburban Jogger 