Monday

I’m in a lot less pain than I was last week since I started stretching my hips out more. My lower back is feeling a lot better and so is my hamstring. Unfortunately my hip is not showing the same improvement and I’m not sure whether it just needs a bit more time or a bit of rest or what. My timing here is pretty terrible as we are going into another lockdown this week, so whether I’d be able to see a physio – who knows at the moment. Though I actually had a fairly pain free 12k run on Sunday by 1. Stopping and stretching every couple of kilometres, and 2. Trying to keep my cadence high.

Cadence (number of steps per minute) is a weird thing. If you ever try running without shoes you will naturally hit a very high cadence because your body will make sure that the ball of your foot is striking the ground underneath you. But as soon as you put shoes on, most people’s cadence slows right down and their heel hits the ground in front of them, with the leg outstretched. There’s a lot of debate about foot strike, but I think everyone agrees that a stride length that has your contact point much in front of you is a bad thing because it puts everything through a greater range of motion than it’s really ‘designed’ for.

Usually my fast pace cadence is about 180, which is the magic number that comes up a lot in the literature, but my leisurely slow runs can drop down to about 168 easily. Anyway, on Sunday my pace was slow but my cadence was 174, which is pretty good and might be why it felt better.

So, job seeking:

Awkwardly, my boss has added me to LinkedIn. I got the email on Friday but I’ve been so bored of the whole thing that I haven’t logged in since then so I haven’t accepted yet. If he’s actually looked at my profile he might cotton onto the fact I’m starting to look around. We’ll see if he mentions this… probably not.

The recruiter from last week still keeps trying to phone me but today he finally left a voicemail. He rambles a bit and then says “I don’t know where you are with your job search, but if you could give me a call back that’d be great”. Whyyyyyy.

The thing I’m noticing is that salaries are lower than when I looked previously and I wouldn’t move unless it was a decent pay jump. Or rather, some salaries are the same, but there’s a lot more at the lower end of the market. Sad though it is, it might just be best to sit tight for a few months and wait for things to pick up. Because, obviously, in a few months, COVID will be over and brexit will have transformed the UK into a glorious, prosperous nation again.

This is what happened last time though. I tried, I failed, I got bored, then a few months later I tried much harder and succeeded. Though I was on antidepressants the second time around.