Game of Moans

The other day, a friend of mine was quizzing me about my marathon training. The long runs you have to do each week, she wanted to know - were they painful or boring? Well, naturally, I had to put her straight on that matter right away. You're quite, quite wrong, I told her -  they are both painful AND boring.
Actually, I'll take the boring bit over the painful part any day. I can cope with a bit of boredom. That feeling of  "oh God, if I have to run round this sodding park one more time, past the same sodding trees, and the same sodding lake, and the same sodding teenagers loafing about on the same sodding park bench, my brain will literally implode". There are ways to counteract that - counting off the distance you've covered, for example, or playing complex games in your brain like trying to remember who killed who in Games of Thrones,

Let me think - who did he kill?

or which members of the cabinet haven't yet resigned over Brexit. Basically anything to distract your brain from the tedious task of plodding on for hour after hour.
It's the pain that's harder to take. Sometimes it seems to me that long-distance running is more about pain management than anything else. Or rather, it's about trying to spread the pain equally around your body and stop it overloading just the one part. Last week, the aching was mostly in my calves, the week before it was my hamstrings giving me grief. Now, just for a change, the backs of my knees have decided to get in on the act. I'm expecting my ankles and the balls of my feet to start complaining that they haven't had their fair share of attention soon too. 
One particular little niggle is the ligament at the top of my right hamstring, just underneath my bum cheek. It likes to give me a little tweak every now and then - usually when I'm somewhere in public which makes it difficult and somewhat embarrassing, not to say downright socially unacceptable, to give it a quick massage to make it go away.
Last week's long run (17 miles, at least 4 of them torture) was especially hard on my calves. I had to stop a couple of times to stretch them out, and I even got a spot of what I suspect was cramp in one of them at one point. By the end, it felt like my legs were coming apart or even falling off, as if the nuts and bolts holding them on to my hips had all worked themselves loose. 
Thankfully, I'm friends with a fantastic physio, Isobel Phillips (you really should check her out if you're anywhere near North-east London and, like, your legs are falling off - email her at isobel@abody4life.com), who pretty much put me back together again with a customised therapeutic massage. When you get a really good working over like that, which actively targets whatever muscular problem you're having, you realise the difference it can make.
Keeping my muscles stress and strain free and avoiding any injuries is now becoming a bit of an obsession. One friend of a friend managed to break his leg a fortnight before he was due to run a marathon in Paris, which I suppose is a pretty foolproof way of ducking out of it. But it's not just fractured femurs I'm trying to steer clear of. Knackered knees, aching ankles, twinged toes - I can't afford anything that's going to take away any of the limited training time I have left. I'm even scared of catching a cough or a cold between now and April 28th, just in case that would disable me for a few crucial days. Basically I just want to be wrapped up in cotton wool for the next four weeks and only allowed out for runs and meals.