On Your Marks: The snow has a lot to answer for

First of all, it caused our free run night at K2 to be postponed (see right). This was particularly annoying because I know everyone who was coming was particularly excited for it.

Secondly, I blame it for an injury which has been a minor setback. Knowing the snow was due to fall on Friday afternoon, I went to do my full body workout early in the morning.

The five minute cross trainer workout went well, but 13 minutes into my 25 minutes on the treadmill, disaster struck (ok, I concede that’s quite dramatic).

I felt a sharp pain shoot up my left calf muscle. It was a similar pain I felt in my right calf when I attempted my first parkrun back in September.

So I had to stop any more leg exercises and concentrated on the upper body.

And in my first session since then with Owen Callaghan, fitness manager at K2 Crawley, it was very apparent my upper body is something I need to work on.

After a gentle jog into Tilgate Park on Tuesday morning, we went to outdoor gym, which is a wonderful facility.

The jog went ok, although I could feel something going on in the calf. But as you can see from the picture on the right, the outdoor gym work was very hard.

In fact it was so tough I did get very light-headed and had to lie down for a bit. I think Owen was genuinely worried for me.

I did ask Owen what he thought of my progress and what I need to improve on.

Here is what he had to say:

“I’ve been really impressed with Mark’s progress so far, progressing from three miles up to almost six miles in only a few weeks.

“We still have a lot of work to do and have identified areas to work on such as muscular strength, flexibility and mobility. These areas need a real focus to achieve the goals we have set, however we have seen steady improvements.

“We have already come across a couple of obstacles with a calf strain halting Mark’s progress of late but remain on track by adjusting his programme doing more upper body work and changing up his cardiovascular training by now using the X-Trainer and spin bikes, also focusing on strengthening the calf with additional stretching, strength and mobility work on the muscles around the area.”

So a lot of work still to do but I am confident I can overcome these obstacles.