Long runs and the Ability to Eat All the Food

What’s so curious is that this doesn’t happen as soon as you finish the run. That would be too easy to manage. In fact, it’s even more curious than my waterproof’s ability to suddenly lose its waterproofing claims but we’ll get on to that later. No, this normally happens a good few hours after a long run.

What am I talking about? You may be familiar. A good two or three hours after a long run, I can walk into the kitchen and comfortably be able to eat all the food in all the cupboards. Don’t get me wrong, when I finish the run I’m ready for a ďrink and a small snack. Later on though, that’s when I’m talking eating of mammoth proportions.

This is manageable in our own house. It’s all our food and my long suffering family is aware of my propensity for sizeable snackage. Should I be at a friend’s house though, then it gets awkward. Small plate of biscuits comes out…gone, in seconds. Bowl of nibbles while we’re chatting…nom nom nom, gone. I don’t have many friends at the best of times and this doesn’t help at all!

Anyway, I don’t want this post to be dominated by eating, as my Sundays can be, since I had a particularly excitingly, weather related long run this week. 20k on the legs and this little gem was a real highlight:

It was an entertaining run. Starting off, it was a bit rainy and windy but fairly bright so it wasn’t going to dampen my spirits. Look at my happy little face:

And look at how bright my waterproof is! As I alluded to earlier, I use the term waterproof loosely. Note how well it’s holding up in that pic – reasonably well. Fast forward 10k and continually ramp up the rain as the run goes on and you get to this:

Look at that smile now. Much less convincing, combined with mild despair in the eyes. And the waterproof now? I suspect a tea towel would have done a similar job keeping the rain off. (Lack of) waterproof aside, it then stopped raining and I got my glimpse of the rainbow. After about 30 seconds it vanished again but that really brightened up the run and it’s those moments that really stick in my mind on long runs. It was almost as if the rainbow appeared just for me. I loved it.

Plus, I knew we had chilli for tea. Mountains of it 😉

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