Yesterday was the start of my 16-week Great Birmingham Run training schedule. I only had to do ‘3 miles easy’ what could possibly go wrong?

I was so busy working my way through corrections on my current PhD chapter that I left it too late to make it to running club. As a result I made the decision to do my training session on the roads surrounding the tennis club.

I thought that I’d be smart and that I had changed my Garmin from kilometres into miles. During the ‘run’ I realised that it was still recording my splits in kilometres, awesome!!

During the run I noticed that my calf muscles felt quite tight. No make that *really* tight, almost in the painful category. I also noticed that it seemed to take more forever to get to 1 mile. My Garmin appears to suggest that I ran through several wooded areas and through some private gardens last night. I suspect that the amount of trees were causing issues with the GPS signal and that as a result I ran more than 3 miles.

With my calves feeling like they were about to go into spasm at any moment, I decided that it was time for some The Stick punishment. I bought my Stick at the London Marathon Expo in 2006?, last night was the first time I’ve actually used it!

I then dug out my foam roller (also never really used), did a spot of research into correct rolling techniques on YouTube, and had a go at rolling out my tight spots. Bugger me it was painful. I only managed a couple of goes before giving up. I clearly need to take this injury prevention more seriously. Needless to say my calves are still feeling tight at the moment.

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Away from my running woes I’ve been trying to sort out some of my PhD related woes. At the moment I feel like I am months behind where I should be. This afternoon rather than cracking on with my work, I spent my time completing another application form for China and then concocting an Academic CV to accompany my application. I didn’t really have a clue what an Academic CV is meant to look like so I based mine on this example

It’s a huge concern that I don’t have any ‘proper’ papers published yet. All I have produced so far is a book review which is available here Go me!! I guess that one of the problems with being a home-based student is the lack of what I would call friendly competition with other research students. Yes all research is unique and individual, but I know that if I was surrounded by students trying to publish papers, I would make more effort.

Enough of the moaning. I have a chapter that is ready to be submitted to a journal, I need to push my supervisor into letting me submit it!

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Tomorrow I am scheduled to complete another 3-mile training run. *Fingers and toes crossed* that another stretching session and torture session on my foam roller helps to sort out my calf muscles.