Taming the Chaos: probability and the heroes

Some time ago, I was discussing critical hits and misses in RPGs with a friend. We talked about how criticals, badly handled, can ruin a game.
He set me on the trail to writing this post - but being the kind of sciencey person I am, I couldn't just spew back out all he'd said. I had to go look for the facts and logic myself - which in turn led me to find other opinions...

To start with, in a survey that I ran on some RPG forums, I found that responders said they liked character skill or player choice to be the most significant part in success or failure, not the dice roll.

On the other hand, in another survey, responders said that they like the extra randomness of critical hits and misses.

So here I'll look at what we can do to marry these two apparently conflicting preferences.

Critically Random

Critical hits and misses are a staple of a great many RPGs. You rolled the biggest number on the die, so you get more than mere success - and the inverse for critical failures.

Players love criticals, because they reward those big rolls, and punish the low rolls - but are they opening up a wealth of excessively random results, where the die result overrides the skill of the character?

Yes, I believe I can show that to be the case.

Critical misses: the more you try the worse you fail
With critical failure rules, whenever you roll the dice to determine your character's success at a task, you run the risk of a critical failure.
The more often you roll, the more likely you are to screw up in this way. This punishes the player characters more than the non-player characters, because the PCs are the focus of the game. You're making all the rolls.
Further, lots of game systems have ways for powerful characters to take more actions during their turn. The more actions you can take, the more you can achieve, meaning that you are generally more effective.
Similarly, some games use dice pools, whereby you roll more dice of the same type to represent your increasing power, and count the number of dice that beat a given target number. It's common in those games to have a critical failure happen when the number of your dice that come up with the minimum result (usually 1) exceed the number that succeed. But it is also common in such games for the success number to be moveable - a routine task might need you to roll a 5, but a difficult task might need a 6, for example.

But both these systems also give you more chances to critically fail, because you're rolling the dice - and taking that risk - more often.
It shouldn't be a consequence of increased power to run a greater risk of catastrophic failure than some unskilled dweeb, should it?

Critical hits: GM loses control
Critical hits give some special result as a reward for a good roll on the dice. Where this can be problematic is that the game's progress can be altered in the extreme by a single random outcome.

For example: In 3rd edition D&D, using only the Players Handbook (let alone the plethora of Splatbooks that add so many options that the creators can't keep track of them), it is possible to create a 1st level (that is, a fresh start up) half-orc barbarian character who can deal 66 damage on a successful critical hit. (Our Strength 20 half-orc is using a Greataxe, is in a berserk frenzy [barbarian Rage], and has rolled maximum damage on a critical hit.)
To put that in context, a routine hit from the same character (no critical, no Rage, rolling average damage) would deal 13 damage. Hell, a maximum damage roll without the critical is 22.

Why's that important? Well, a normal bad guy for this 1st level barbarian is likely to have 10 hit points or so. So the barbarian can kill one of these routinely - whether they get a critical or not. Clearly this is the barbarian's job.
But the heroes aren't supposed to just beat down every encounter they meet. Sometimes - usually for the sake of plot - they need to meet something so overpowering that they ought to run. The Dungeonmasters' Guide even tells us to do this. So an overpowering challenge (challenge rating 6, to use the jargon) that the players are supposed to flee from is likely to have 50 to 80 hit points - a young white dragon, for example, has 76.

With one very lucky hit, the 1st level barbarian can reduce this supposedly overpowering monster to a mere 10 hit points - low enough for the rest of the player party to finish it off with little risk.

Similarly, RoleMaster and its derivatives, (including Middle Earth Role-Paying (MERP) and SpaceMaster, and all), had long tables of critical hit results. Often these were amusing ("arrow pierces both ears; hearing impaired" followed by some extreme damage multiplier for skewering the target's skull) - but ultimately they created the same problem: through random chance, dangerous foes could be destroyed with a single attack.

Conversely, this can easily go the other way: an encounter that was intended to be routine, or even a pushover can explode in the players' faces. That lowly hobgoblin that the mid-level party have cornered stands a non-zero chance of killing one of the player characters in a single hit.

At this point, whether it's the players who are winning big or loosing out, our GM has lost control of the game.

The overpowering encounter has been defeated, or the hero on whom the story-line has been pinned is dead. The game is most likely to grind to a halt while the GM tries to think of a new story line - or they'll be tempted to alter the supposedly overpowering encounter to add another monster to take the dead one's place, or somehow claim that the dead PC lives.

Very unsatisfactory.

What Do We Do About It?

If randomisation can ruin the game, what do we tend to do about it? Anecdotally, it seems, we cheat.

Fudging the rolls
When random rolls go against the story, the GM is tempted to cheat. This special cheating is called "fudging", and most games even explicitly advise the GM to do it.
To me, this ruins the fun. If I know that the GM is fudging to keep PCs alive, to push the story forward, then all sense of risk is lost. I feel like Superman before anyone figured out Kryptonite was bad for my health. As a player, I've quit out of few games over the years where cheating in my favour has kept me alive - and I know other players who feel the same way.

I've also found that GM fudging regarding dice rolls is a significant issue with the wider gamer world. In my survey, I found that about a third of responders volunteered that they considered GM rolls to be subject to doubt, and that they resented or otherwise felt negatively about that. The other two thirds gave no opinion - which considering it wasn't a question I'd asked in the survey, we can't really take as a positive result for GM trust.

Doing away with fudge
If fudging the rolls is a source of dissatisfaction, how can we do away with it?

Rolling in the open:
The GM can of course, roll all the dice in front of the players. That works fine if our game is under control - but if randomisation can have a negative impact on the game, then rolling in the open doesn't solve this. It can even lead GMs to extreme methods, like practising sleight of hand or loaded dice - and no-one in their right mind wants that.

But if we've got our randomisation in a place where all parties are satisfied with its results, then rolling in the open can be engaging and exciting. Players pay more attention when the GM rolls the dice in front of them.
If you adopt this method, you may need to get your players on board with the principle of dramatic irony - the players may end up knowing (or suspecting) things their characters don't know. If the players can see that you've rolled a tiny number on the dice, but announced a massive number as the result, they know the big bonuses you're adding to that roll, and may treat their antagonist with more fear than he would normally command.
Me, I like to cultivate dramatic irony in my games: giving out scenes where the villains discuss their plans, or shadowy figures stalk the player characters. As long as everyone is on board with the separation of player and character knowledge, it can be good fun to play along with the ignorance.

Players roll all the dice:
D&D's Unearthed Arcana supplement for 3rd edition included this variant rule: Let the players roll everything for themselves.

If the GM's dice rolls are suspect, then stop rolling. Instead of the monsters having a dice roll to attack the heroes, the heroes get a defence roll to avoid the monsters' attacks. Rather than the vile vizier trying to lie to the heroes, the heroes try to sense his motives.
Instead of the GM rolling for the NPCs, you assume that the NPCs' actions are always the average of what they might achieve, and let the players do the randomisation.

The great advantage of this is that the players become proactive, leading the action, even when they're defending against a horde of attackers.

Of course, this involves tweaking the rules of the game. It may take some work on the GM's part - but most RPGs give you some idea of what the average results of typical rolls are going to be. You'll just need to work out the rules of thumb for your NPCs and monsters, and apply them.

Again, this method only really works if the randomisation element in your game is sound.

Taming the Chaos

What can we do to keep the game manageable (assuming we're not going to cheat)?

Change the dice: 
If we change from a d20 to a d12, the chances of getting the maximum or minimum result increase - and vice versa. So to decrease randomness, it might appear that we should increase the number of sides on our dice.

But we can't simply swap dice types around without rescaling the modifiers. A +2 to a roll is a big deal when you're rolling a d10, but relatively insignificant when you're rolling a d100.
If we take the d20 as a base, and change it to a d100 instead, we'll need to multiply all the modifiers in the game by 5.

As long as we make sure that the point at which criticals happens stays as the maximum and minimum results of our die type, we should find that they happen far less often (one 5th of the time).

But is that really solving the issue? A less common chance is still going to happen now and then - and perhaps the increased rarity will work against us, as we become even less inclined to plan for those outside chances.

Do away with criticals?
My first instinct is to certainly get rid of critical failures, they're annoying at best and often counter-productive at worst - but critical success is a reward that players seem to resent losing.
I ran a quick poll of RPG forums again, and found that three times as many people liked critical success rewards than disliked them, and over half of people disliked critical failures.
I also found that a significant number of responders volunteered that they didn't like critical success in skills - combat seemed to be acceptable, but the outlandish outcomes of critical skill success seemed to be a randomisation too far.

While getting all this data in, there were some critical failure rules that were brought up that seems to be well-liked, and certainly appeared interesting.

So if critical hits in combat are well liked, how can we keep them? We need to retain the excitement of reward for a good roll, while ensuring they don't ruin the GM's plans (by killing the heroes, or by the heroes killing supposedly overpowering encounters).

Critical advantage
In the game I run, I make critical success in combat give advantage, instead of massive damage.
When a critical result comes up on the dice, the player (or me, as the GM) can opt for some extra effect. in my rules, I split those extra effects into Attack, Maim, or Move.
The Attack option means that the creature can get a free attack (either a simple attack, or a combat trick, like tripping the defender, or disarming them). The attack must make a new check to make this attack. There are a limited number of attacks in a round, so the player has to judge whether this is worth it.
The Maim option lets the player choose to inflict some injury on top of the damage they are deal, so that the defender starts to bleed each round, or has reduced movement, or some similar effect. The defender gets a check to resist this effect.
The Move option lets the attacker re-position themselves in the fight as a free move.

In play, these options have kept the reward of critical hits, which players like, but have largely retained control of the game. With a single additional hit, a hero is unlikely to kill an overpowering menace - and vice versa.
Also, the variety of options gives players choice

Optional failure
While we're praising options for players, I should mention one of the better critical miss rules that was brought up while I was researching this post.
In a few games, a bad roll on the dice allows the player to take the option of re-rolling - but if that second roll is a failure, something catastrophic happens.

For example: In at least one of the systems, that catastrophic thing is damage to your weapon - the game is a post-apocalypse setting, where materials to repair swords are scarce. Let's look at that in action...

Altair tries to hit the lowly goblin with his staff, and his player rolls a 1. The player can opt to re-roll, but risks breaking or damaging his staff  if he misses with the second roll. The player thinks the goblin is not worth the risk, and decided to simply miss. No critical.
Later, Altair is faced with a foul giant. The stakes are far higher, and every hit counts. Altair's player chooses to re-roll his potential critical miss, as he judges it better to try again and risk breaking the staff.

Conclusion: Chaos Tamed?

The randomness of critical hits and misses can be fun, and need not wreck the precarious balance of the GM's plans.
Options and choice for the players are good - giving bonus choices to increase drama is better than merely adding damage, or a secondary table of random effects. When players can choose how their awesome or terrible dice rolling effects the game, there's more meaningful fun to be had.

Marlborough Challenge - done!

After 33 miles of wide open views, chalk hill figures, ancient burial mounds, stone circles and neolithic tracks, sun, wind and rain, elation and pain - I'm done!

33rd mile

I came in 107th, out of 150-odd finishers. About 40 people either dropped out along the way, or didn't show up on the day. I managed to get round in 6 hours 27 minutes, which is about what I expected, if not a bit faster.

Big thanks go out to Pete and Jo for coming down to Avebury and the finish line, and to Helen, for putting up with my training and boring blurbs about hill reps and pace records for the last few months, and then being good enough to hug me (despite my being all stinky and sweaty) at various check points on the way round.
But untold thanks must go to Stewart, who came along to give me the support of someone who knew the route, had run it before, and could ferry Helen between check points. Without Stewart, it would have been a far lonelier run.
I also have to say how amazing the other runner on this event were - everyone (at least, everyone I met) was cheerful and friendly, far more interested in having a good day than beating anyone.

My muscles seems fine today: tired, but not aching. More uncomfortable is my left knee, which really started to whinge and complain at about 28 miles. The pain seems centred on the tendons along the side of the knee, that move the foot and lower leg, and it comes on with the last few degrees of movement between bending and straightening my knee. On the other hand, I can already walk down stairs like a normal person, so it's not all that bad.
I had a similar injury on my first long run, last year - on my right knee. It just needed rest and shorter distances - and now, I think it's stronger.
I dare say I'll be recovered enough for work on Wednesday.

You can, of course, still visit my Just Giving page to donate - it stays open till the 12th August. Thanks to everyone who's donated so far. It really helped inspire me to keep going, knowing that people have put their hands in pockets to donate on my behalf.

And now? A few short runs this week, and settle into a 10 mile max routine again... until the next event that takes my fancy.
Someone told me there's a run from Avebury to Stonehenge on the May Day Bank Holiday...

Dancing lessons from God

"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God"
Bokonon, from Cat's Cradle

Last Friday, I was running my usual lunch time route round the airfield perimeter where the glider club meets, and I was stopped by a chap in a Landrover. "You can't run here", he said. "There is no right of way here." Or at least, that was the jist of what he said.

After I'd run back to the public road and gone back to work, I looked up the local Ordnance Survey maps to check that he was correct. Yes, he was, it turn out. There is no public right of way on that path. I'd been running there for three years, but apparently I'd never had the right.

So, I had to find another route with defined rights of way.

As it happened (as it was meant to happen), I found better, hillier route, through woods and fields.

The views of Warwickshire are lovely. Round the airfield, being a wide open flat landscape, all I would ever see was the sky. That's interesting enough - cloudscape and sunlight and the shadows of rain - but I spent much of my time looking out for gliders rather than enjoying the scenery. (Gliders will kill you if they hit you, and they're very quiet and hard to steer out the way of a suddenly emerging runner...)

But now I'm rewarded with high places and wide views of rolling hills and fields and woods. We're having a late spring after that cold spell, and all the plants are hurrying to catch up - the trees are still partly bare, but the grass flowers are out and the bluebells are tentatively carpeting the woods. It's only going to get more lovely.

Of course, all this running and enjoyment of the great outdoors is only possible because of my great medication. Remember to sponsor me if you haven't so far!

My Own Private Marathon

It's less than a month till my big run. I'm still short of my sponsorship target - every pound counts, so please follow this link and donate anything you can afford.

As part of my prep for the Marlborough Downs Challenge 33, I'm running a marathon today.

That's 7 miles less than the 33 miles of the Marlborough race, of course, but it'll be a good bench mark.

So I'm off down the A5 to Towcester, then back home by the back roads through Blakesley, Maidford and Preston Capes - and finally, over the dreaded Newnham Hill at about mile 24.

It's a lovely sunny day today. Sunblock, asthma medication, sports drinks, sunglasses and phone all ready. Best be off then!

I fully expect to be told I'm going the wrong way, and a long way from London.

After the Heroes are Dead

What happens to your game after a total party kill?

Eventually, despite all your careful planning as a GM, the players will lose. You'll be looking round at the blank or grumpy faces of your players after a TPK, feeling maybe guilty, maybe pleased with yourself - but realising that you've just stopped the game. Dead.

So - you've killed the whole player party. Now what?

You could of course play a different game - either a wholly different game (Monopoly or poker instead of an RPG), play with different RPG rules (Traveller instead of D&D), or play in a different setting (d20 Modern instead of d20 Future).

But if you've got all the gear in place to play your preferred RPG, you probably don't want to ditch that game just yet.

Here are a few options to let your game carry on in one way or another.

New party
The traditional solution to a TPK is a new party. The players start making up new characters. This was once considered the normal thing to do, just as killing the whole party was once considered fairly normal.
Of course, early RPGs tended to have simple character creation rules, so this process often only took a few minutes. Now we have two-page character sheets as the norm, and many options for customisation, the new party solution can be more of an ordeal, less fun.

If you're creating a new party, you generally have two options for continued play:

• New goals: a fresh game in the same setting
• The new party is unrelated to the old party, and will pursue different stories and adventures.
• This will take a fair bit of work on the part of the GM - depending on when in the game session your TPK happened, you may get away with having some introductory hook before you get to take a break till the next session.
• Same goals: pick up the pieces of the previous failure
• The new party is a rescue team, or rival explorers, following the same or similar adventure path.

Captured, not killed
The bad guys have hauled the defeated and unconscious heroes away to some stronghold, where they regain consciousness. From this situation, they can think about escape ... regaining their McGuffins (and other necessary equipment) ...

• Means of escape: how do they get out again?
• You'll need to think about how often guards patrol and jailers visit, how difficult the lock is to pick, and so on.
• You'll need a layout for the dungeon or wherever it is the heroes have been incarcerated.
• Interrogation: how do you resolve torture and questioning?
• Do the rules you're playing with have a mechanic for interrogation, or will you have to make one up? Can you just roleplay it - letting the player decide how stoic his character is? This will depend on your players, but it's worth thinking about this before you spring such scenes on the players.
• Careful with this topic - your players will have different levels of enthusiasm for scenes of this nature.

Capturing the heroes can of course move them deep into the enemy base - which may have been a goal of theirs all along.

The capture scenario works best if the bad guys would realistically feel the need to extract information from the heroes, hold them ransom, or similar. It's not realistic if the bad guys would gain more by killing their enemies once they were at their mercy.
Remember though - even some dumb animals may store their fresh meat for later: like the spiders in Middle Earth

A variant of the capture idea is that one of the heroes gets away.
Perhaps the sneakiest of the hero party isn't found during the imprisonment of the fallen, and comes round by herself later. This gives us a cinematic episode in which you can jump back and forth between the gloating bad guys, and the daring rescue attempt.

Undead
The heroes become ghosts or vampires and continue a shadowy existence.

• Vile undead: the vile bad guys re-use the fallen heroes as undead! 
• A few more vampires for the evil army are always useful.
• The players then have the option of playing as evil undead (which can be great fun in itself) or trying to regain their lost humanity.
• Tragic spooks: the woe of the restless dead!
• The heroes are insubstantial ghosts, trying to influence the world to right the wrongs they left unfinished.
• This also marries up with the vile undead version, in that some players may wish to portray their monstrous undead characters as victims rather than predators.

You'll need to make sure you have some sort of mechanical method to resolve conflicts between the vile nature of the undead, and the resisting human soul. You'll also need to decide how - if at all - the heroes can be returned to life once they've become undead.
In less fantastic settings, for "undead", you could insert "hypnotised agent" - where the players' characters are returned as evil clones, cyborg agents, or Manchurian Candidates under the control of the evil mastermind. The outcome is effectively the same.
You may find that your players differ on whether they want to play as evil, or try to return their characters to life in some way. If this seems likely, you might find the group would enjoy playing these  factions off against each other.


Afterlife
The heroes are dead, and go to their appointed place in the afterlife.

• Resurrected: you are our only hope!
• The heroes are returned to life by some future earthly agents, perhaps to fulfil their previous mission, or perhaps to take on a new threat. Think of King Arthur and his knights, who will supposedly return to aid Albion in its time of need. Perhaps ages have passed, and the world is utterly different - the consequences of the heroes previous failure. Or maybe only a few months or weeks or days have passed.
• In fantasy games, magic may raise the dead. In sci-fi, maybe cloning, brain download, or cryogenics allows the heroes to live again.
• Fight for life: the Seventh Seal effect
• the heroes are given the chance to defeat Death in the afterlife, and must argue their case  to return to life.

You'll need some ideas about how the afterlife appears in your setting, what denizens there are, bureaucracy and rules, styles and themes. Are there different parts for heroes of different ethics and morals? Different cultures?

Dream prophesy
After the TPK, return the game to a prior point in play, and continue as though the previous deaths were some sort of vision or dream.
The morning before the massacre, with the heroes waking and preparing for the day ahead, is a good point to revert to, but you can pick any time you feel like - even just a few minute before.
One (or more) of the heroes had a dream or vision of the death of the whole party - and armed with that prophetic knowledge, they can try to avert disaster.

• One visionary: the Final Destination effect
• only one of the party knows about the vision / dream, and must try to convince the rest of the heroes about the danger ahead.
• This requires the rest of the players to separate their player knowledge from character knowledge, and play their roles well. The dramatic irony of such a situation can be great fun to play with - but if your players aren't up for the challenge of role-playing ignorance, then this may fall flat. Your mileage may vary, as they say.
• Shared dream: the whole party recalls the vision 
• This is obviously as far more magical event, and will tend to elicit proactive cooperation to avoid the TPK.

These method work well if the party were heavily overpowered - they get a chance to plan ahead and try again.

Death in action
Planning and preparation is required for all of the suggestions above - but you can leave that preparation quite generic until you need it.
For the Captured scenario, for example, you only need to have a sketch of generic dungeon or jail, with a few notes on guards and locks - these sorts of things can be handy whether or not you kill everyone!

Of course, it's a good idea when the TPK happens to talk about what your players want to do. It's no good trying to carry on if the players aren't on board, and it's no good trying to change the tone of the game suddenly in the middle of play - making them all spectres, or going on the spirit journey through the afterlife - if the players aren't up for that.
Remember as well to be sensitive to players personal beliefs, as far as you know them. It can be helpful to reiterate that you're playing a fictional game, not exploring religious truths.

Dice Results and You

I've been running some surveys on a few gaming forums (fora? - sounds wrong, but might be right).
UK Role Players Forum
Giant in the Playground Forum

I'm interested in how gamers feel about success and failure, and whose dice roll determines that success or failure. My intent was to use the results as part of the support for various game-play ideas I had: being a sciencey sort of chap, I thought it would be best to get real data rather than rely on my own pre-conceptions about what other gamers feel.

I've got around fifty responses at the time of writing, and may yet get more, but it seems like a good time to dig in and examine the spread of answers.

What was I trying to prove?
My hypothesis was that gamers prefer to roll their own success and failure - they feel less bad when they fail if they rolled the dice themselves, and feel better when they roll successes for themselves.
For "fail", I include all bad outcomes for the player's character: not noticing a trap, falling off a cliff, being hit in combat, etc.

The Questions

1. When you roll good numbers (so your character succeeds), how do you feel?
2. When you roll badly (so your character fails), how do you feel?
3. For opposed rolls, if you roll well, but the GM rolls better (so your character fails), how do you feel?
4. For opposed rolls, when the GM rolls poorly but you roll better (so your character succeeds), how do you feel?
5. Do you feel better about success when you roll the dice, or when the GM rolls the dice?
6. Do you feel worse about failure when you roll the dice, or when the GM rolls?

In Q3 & Q4, "opposed" rolls are when the player and the GM each roll dice in contest with each other, and the better result wins. They're fairly typical in lots of RPGs.
I felt these sorts of rolls were significantly different to simple uncontested rolls (where the player is just aiming for a target number) because the introduction of the GM as another agent in the roll adds a social / competitive dimension.

Q5 & Q6 are flip sides of the same question: if success is better when you roll the dice, then it follows that success is less good when the GM rolls.

The Results
Q1 & Q2 gave fairly predictable results: players feel good about success, and bad about failure - or neutral. Notice that the majorities here are fairly overwhelming.

Q1: Majority positive feelings about success

Q2: Majority negative feelings about failure

 It's also interesting that while no-one expressed negative feelings about success, a few responders expressed positive feelings about failure - roughly the same number as expressed neutral feelings.
Those comments were along the lines of "failure can lead to exciting situations" - essentially, that the drama of the game can be served by the failure of the heroes. Very altruistic!


 Q3 & Q4 again gave similar results to Q1 and Q2, but notice that the overwhelming majorities are reduced. There are a lot more neutral opinions when the rolls are opposed.

Q3 & Q4: Reduced majority +ve & -ve feelings about opposed rolls, increased neutral feelings

Q5 & Q6 show that the majority feels better about success and failure when rolling the dice for themselves. However, it's worth noticing that the majority is reduced regarding failure.

Q5 & Q6: Majority favours player rolling the dice

The Nuances
Because the questions were asked in open forums, responders were free to elaborate on their answers. This produced lots of subtle variation to the bald results, and some interesting unsolicited insights - some of which were quite commonly expressed.

GM fudging:
Most obviously, the issue of GMs fudging the dice results came up in about one third of responses - and the comments were all negative. From these results, it appears that GMs' honesty as referees of the game is either viewed neutrally (about 2/3 answers expressed no opinion on GM fudging), or negatively (a little over 1/3 of answers showed suspicion of GMs' declared dice results).

National bias:
The UK Roleplayers forum (massively UK membership, few international members) produced a similar overall pattern of results to the Giant in the Playground forum (54% US membership, otherwise international), but included far less "Neutral" responses.
In fact, the only neutral responses on the UK RP forum are those that expressed no opinion on GM fudging - which was an unsolicited topic.

The Conclusions?
My hypothesis that players feel better about rolling the dice for themselves is born out by the responses.
It also appears that feelings are stronger about success than they are about failure.

The untrustworthiness of GMs with regards to dice rolls is an issue for a significant proportion of responders. All those who expressed an opinion on trust said that they did not trust GMs' dice results.

As to what to do with these results - I plan to go into the practical application of the results in another post.
These surveys were carried out to establish the opinions of fellow players to support some game-play ideas I've been mulling over. Watch this space!

Recovery Days

I decided not to go running today.

Yesterday, I ran 32 km, and it's tried me out. All the fine muscles and tendons round both knees and ankles are aching still. It hurts a bit to climb the stairs.

It's been a long time since I ached the day after a run. Yesterday wasn't an especially long run - I've gone farther, and recovered faster - but I think that it was the pace I kept up through the run that's left me aching.

We've just entered April - my big event target is the 33 mile race in May, a little over a month away. Now is not the time to be wussing out of training.
I'm pretty sure tomorrow I'll be fine - but despite my fatigue, I don't want to loose today.

So - onto the static bike for some high intensity cycling, and a bout of boxing training with my heavy punch bag.
My knees and ankles are aching, so I pick the bike as it doesn't impact those joints. Also, boxing doesn't impact the legs, except in asking for agility.

Both these exercises are good for general fitness and cardio - and those are things I need to keep up with too. It's all very well pushing my distance endurance limits, but without a strong heart to back it up, it won't do me much good.

http://www.justgiving.com/Marlborough-33-2013