Doctor, Doctor, sometimes I think I'm a wigwam...

and sometimes I think I'm a teepee.
"It's clear that you're too tense"

I have of late been suffering from the twin curses of the serious endurance athlete (*cough*)...tiredness and sore legs. Now as Already Entered Dave has rightly pointed out, running 760 miles in four and a half months may have something to do with it. I know that some of you would tweak the proboscis of such distance in hearty contempt, but I'm not a high mileage Hamster, so this is a lot for me.

The tiredness is easily managed by sleeping more (it's worth reading the whole blog just for that insightful nugget of ultra-running wisdom) but I've been radical and innovative with the soreness; I've been consciously relaxing my leg muscles before dozing off. This was taught to me as a general form of relaxation by my dear ole mom in about 1972. Hi mom! She reads every word, you know! Hey, if you don't remember the Seventies, you weren't there, man...or something like that. Anyway, I cranked up Slade on the Iplod and applied the technique to my poor sore legs in particular. it worked!

I really thought I was on to something and that my fame would spread far and wide through the endurance sport world, but it turns out that someone beat me to it; it seems to be remarkably similar to the Alexander Technique. Bugger, beaten by new-agers again! First Lananininoonoo and her yogalates, now this! Bet they didn't do it to Slade, though...

Blimey, the comments have been flooding in, inasmuch as two is a flood. Mouse posted this about mental strategies, which is worth repeating:

"Well if you've got checkpoints, how far apart are they? They give you the same xx amount of runs of xx amount of distance in the same way that IM Germany is 4 x 10k (so is Copenhagen which was quite useful for me not being confused for the following year). The JW Ultra is 3 x 10 mile runs and so on and so forth.

Although, sometimes this method is broken down into a different strategy if you are running in company (has Dave entered yet by the way?) because then it's a strategy of only telling the fish tank joke once 45 mins and other such nonsense to pass the time.

Do your route combos take you back past home? That would be an unmanageable strategy for mices because we'd just pack up and go indoors for a Mars bar instead of carrying on...."

I think that the first paragraph sums it up nicely, though on the longest days, checkpoints are about 13 miles apart; this may need an alternative plan. Hasn't Entered Dave hasn't entered (unlike Already Entered Dave) but I'm sure that the fish tank joke will be making a regular appearance. I shall be modelling my mental strategy on the excellent lateral thinking of our local Royal Mail sorting office; they have quite brilliantly eliminated the problem of discarded red rubber bands by  changing them for buff-coloured rubber bands. Brighter than a marmoset in a highlighter factory, I'd say.

And yes, my multi-routes often involve passing the front door to Hamster Mansions, but I keep going coz I'm well 'ard, me!

In training news, my long run is up to 18 miles and I've started to add some running at 80% max heart rate (or 'a bit faster' as I like to think of it). Intense, yes, too tense, not yet!