One small step...

Neil Armstrong wasn't chosen for the Apollo 11 mission because of his oratory skills. "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" is what he'd intended saying when he stepped from the Eagle (Apollo 11's lunar module) onto the surface of the moon. But it came out all wrong and, it seems, he fluffed the most momentous line of the 20th Century.

I ran tonight for the first time in a week. I can honestly say that I felt no pain, not even a twinge; although there was a slight stiffness above the hip bone toward the kidney area but this could have been to do with not having run in a week. It's a good start and it satisfied my need to just get out there and run.

Were I a young astronaut (rather than a 48 year old gay, diabetic with a sore hip) I'd have an army of boffins monitoring my every breath. I wouldn't be able to break wind without sending the medical team at Houston into blind panic. Instead, I had to monitor myself by more subjective means - sometimes known as the ouch factor.

It's strange when you're running and looking for signals from your body and how it's coping with the exertion. Every footfall is overly scrutenised and you notice things that have, in all probability, been there all along. If anything affected my run tonight it was my right knee, which felt way more weird than my right hip. If I was a religious person, I'd be praying for a positive outcome; for a trouble free run next Monday and a problem free ease back into my normal running schedule.  However, as an atheist, the only God I believe in is Richard Dawkins.

I'm just re-reading the Wiki article I've linked to above and, apparently, one of the first things Buzz Aldrin did when he and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon was to take communion. You'd have thought that after a journey that was the focus of the best science money could buy and then viewing the splendour of the Earth from the "magnificent desolation" of the lunar surface, he would have been prompted to question his religious faith. God really does move in very mysterious ways (Perhaps he's got a sore hip too?).

I'm not due to run again until Monday evening so I shall rest again over the weekend, limiting myself to a couple of swims and the odd breakfast warm up. That, I'm hoping, will be enough to allow me to turn a corner with this hip problem and get back into my regular running schedule.

I think it's a bit too early to announce that, "the Eagle has landed..."