Week 101 – The One With The New Podcast Idea

Progress has been slow in this past week (and no, Progress is not a new nickname I’ve given myself, apt though the sentiment might be for this sentence). I’ve only been for two runs, on Monday and Friday, due to some lingering concerns about leg pain.

I seem to be getting very strong messages from my legs that maybe running isn’t the best sport for me. I’d probably be better off with one of those ones where you spend a lot of time sitting down, and for good measure with very little use of arms too. Maybe pool, or darts. Certainly the Couch to Playing Pool process would be a bit more interesting, especially if the couch in question was in the same room as the pool table. They’d struggle to stretch that out over 8 weeks:

Week 1 – Consider getting up from the sofa, and then realise there’s something interesting on the TV and watch that instead.

Week 2 – Realise you’re getting quite hungry. Do a 3-minute verbal workout on the phone with a pizza delivery company to convince them to bring your food straight to the couch.

Week 3 – Do the same amount of verbal gymnastics to persuade the recycling men to come and collect your pizza box without you moving.

Week 4 – Get off the sofa, take two tentative steps towards the pool table, then say “No, that’ll do me for now” and go and lie back down.

Week 5 – Try and devise an ingenious method of playing pool from the sofa, either by designing some contraption to pull the table towards you or by sticking several cues together to make a supercue you can play pool with from a very long way away.

Week 6 – Call the prototype company they use in The Apprentice that can seemingly build anything and ask them to send somebody to your sofa to discuss your idea. As soon as they arrive tell them that the idea is awful and won’t work, but you do need somebody to play against.

Week 7 – Make a committed effort to get towards the table by moving to sit on the floor halfway between the sofa and the table. To prevent backsliding set the sofa on fire as you leave. Spend some time staring wistfully into the flames as you contemplate the exhausting journey you’ve been so far, and then endure the strict lectures of the firefighters about how setting furniture on fire is not a legitimate motivational tool.

Week 8 – Get the fireman to carry you the rest of the way to the table and ask him if he knows how to play pool.

Congratulations – you are now ready to move on to the next series of podcasts, “Lift a Pool Cue in just Six Months!” ™

That series of podcasts does sound a little bit more enjoyable, and a bit less painful. After my two week layoff I talked about in my last post, it was really pleasant to start the first run back without various parts of me hurting from the word go. Unfortunately that pleasure was short lived, and even though Monday’s run wasn’t too bad, by Tuesday I was starting to feel a bit of pain again. It’s too early to say whether I’ve managed a return to shin splints, but I figured an extra couple of days rest wouldn’t hurt (literally) and took Wednesday’s run off.

This morning was the last of the week 4 podcasts (4 minutes running, 6 minutes running, 4 minutes running) and they seemed to go well enough. The 6 minute run in particular seemed to go better than either of the 4 minute ones – the first one I did too quickly which meant I was still quite tired by the time the 6 minute one started, but by the end of the 6 minutes I’d managed to get into a rhythm – which was subsequently disrupted by stopping and starting again with a 4 minute run a minute or two later.

Week 5 is where the podcasts do something different every day, which I remember being quite an exciting time last time out. It’s still short bursts of runs but the aim by the end of Week 5 is to do 19 minutes total running, which does almost seem achievable.

I’m slightly frustrated to be honest that the leg issues seem to be putting a dampener on the motivation. I find it hard enough to get up and go for a run in the morning before a day pretending to work at university, without the additional burden of “If you do this, it will hurt you at the time and hurt you later as well”. It’s like they tried to give both sides of the equation an equal weighting of pros and cons, but then accidentally got things muddled up and put all the cons on one side.

I’m hopeful that this time round, I won’t have any incidents like I did three weeks ago, and I hope to keep going now through until the end of the 8 week series of podcasts and get up to running 5k by Christmas. If it gets to the point where I can’t actually walk after a run, though, I might revert to blogging about the great new series of podcasts Learn To Throw A Dart In Sixty Easy Sessions.

Channing Tatumato

Week 100 – The One With The Update

Those of you who noticed that this blog had disappeared for a couple of weeks (and the beauty of English means that this sentence can indeed refer to a single person) are probably owed an explanation.

After my Les Miserables-themed last blog post, I concluded that I’d managed to pick up shin splints – my very first proper running injury. The NHS website I looked at has a long list of people who are most at risk of getting them, and the top two they list are people who “have been running for less than five years” (which I would have thought would be most people, to be honest, I don’t know many people who run for more than an hour or so at a time) and those who “run on hard surfaces or slopes”, which will be me until my continued petitions to the council to make pavements out of jelly are accepted.

The website also says that it’s very important not to “run through the pain” since that will only make things worse – as my experience last time writing showed, that does indeed happen. Fortunately there’s no treatment or anything required. Just giving it a solid two weeks rest should sort it out, and this is exactly the sort of medical advice that I can cope with.

So that explains the roughly two-week pause in updates, which was due to me sleeping instead of running. I have been running subsequently (today was my third time out since the event) but this leads to another problem at the moment, which is namely that I’ve done all of this before. It’s quite hard to write about a repeated experience, especially since the residual fitness I was carrying to begin with has faded and it’s essentially feeling the same as doing it for the first time. The podcasts are helpful but are almost exclusively music (and, in fact, the music is stuff repeated from the NHS podcasts so it’s not even new drivel to listen to).

In short, I don’t really have too much to say about the runs, and certainly not enough to write a new blog post every time I go for a jog. As such, I have decided that until I break the 5k barrier (and possibly after that) I’m going to revert to once-a-week updates.

The main issue with this is to come up with a new way of numbering posts. Naturally numbering the weeks makes sense if it’s once per week, but where to start? I started running again 6 weeks ago, I’m currently on the 4^th week of podcasts, but if I’m counting the number of weeks that I’ve actually gone for a run I think this is Week 5 now, with three never-before-broadcast runs. The best solution I figured would be to take the mean of these three options, add 95 for good luck and start at an entirely arbitrary but pleasingly-round 100. (Apologies to those of you who work in bases other than 10).

There’s no actual running update here, other than the fact that I’m still doing it (and it’s much more pleasant when the legs don’t hurt all the time while you’re doing it), but I shall aim to write about this week on Friday.

Calvin Haggis

(The food pun names are staying.)

Run 6 – The One With The Miserable Legs

Something which I am noticing as an increasing recurrent theme for this set of runs is a strong desire to not get up in the morning. I can’t understand why – I mean, why would I want to lie in warmth and comfort when I could be outside exhausted and drenched in sweat?

This morning was one of the ones where the struggle to get up was particularly felt. I was very keen for a while on sleeping for an extra hour and going for a run on Saturday, but the promise of a lie-in tomorrow was enough to get me up and going. Just about, though, and my body definitely wasn’t happy about it. I might need to buy it an extra kidney or something as a present. I think it’d like that.

Another recurring theme of at least this week is my legs going through the five stages of grief when it comes to them. Last week was denial, and I think this week is a combination of anger and depression, in the sense that they seem to be thinking “Man, this is really awful for us. We don’t seem to be able to get out of this, so let’s make it a miserable process so that we don’t have to do this again”. Interestingly, the Wikipedia page for the Kubler-Ross method gives examples of how it applies for people grieving a divorce or substance abuse, but not for those grieving the fact that they’ve recently begun exercise. I feel like an edit is in order.

I was hoping the fact that this weeks’ runs are pretty relaxed by normal standards would get me over the line, but from the moment I started walking I could feel a revolution quelling in my legs, like a lower-extremity Les Miserables. Still, if they wanted to be the stars of their own painful adventure, so be it – I’m still the master of the house as far as the activities I get up to are concerned.

And so I set out, feeling very much on my own and unsupported by the legs that were supposed to get me from A to B, potentially via C and a relaxing café if energy was running low, which it usually is. Instead, though, I seemed to be in some difficulty from the start. The walking to begin with was slightly uncomfortable, but it was when the running started that I had to look down and see if my legs hadn’t been replaced with needles or something. It wasn’t overly painful (although mind you this was only the first attack) but it just made me feel a bit like I’d never run before. This is a feeling you’ll normally find pretty much every day in my life, but this is one of the few times when I reckon that’s not warranted.

For the first run, though, the initial pain subsided after a while, and I thought that maybe I’d just been swindled, that actually my legs were perfectly fine. But then, after the 3 minute run, the walking came back and the second attack began.

It was utterly bizarre, and a theme that continued through the rest of the journey, but it seemed to be at its most uncomfortable during the walks, to the point where starting the runs again was probably the most comfortable part of the journey; by contrast, as soon as the running stopped, suddenly the night of anguish began (if it were night, and the pain was anguish rather than just mildly inconvenient, but the phrasing was necessary).

Still, I decided it was worth going on with the run now that I’d got up and started, and so despite increasing discomfort in the legular region (ask your doctor) I decided to keep going. Each step suggested that this was rapidly turning into a really bad decision, until the confrontation between my legs and the rest of me reached a head just before the final battle, the last jog before the end.

At this point the walks were relatively ponderous, but I was still moving, more or less. But I feel like the legs were trying to make a deal with me, and the bargain wasn’t heavily weighted in my favour. Essentially they said to the rest of my body “By all means, finish the run. But after that, if you expect us to bring him home, you have another think coming”.

And so it must be. I finished the run, and my legs pretty much gave up. The warm-down walk that I was supposed to do ended up being a hobble as I could barely put weight on either leg. I was probably no more than a two minute normal walk away from home, but it took the full five minute warm-down to get there – at which point, having just about forced my way up the stairs, I took about half an hour to just lie down and try and get to the point where I could stand comfortably again. I didn’t even have my usual post-run water before I lay down, because I forgot to take a drink with me to bed and once I was down I wasn’t getting up again.

Fortunately, after the lie down (where I didn’t fall asleep, sadly – I could have dreamed a dream of comfort which would have been much appreciated at that point) things felt a bit more comfortable, and I suspect that by the end of the day        I’ll have forgotten all about it. I’m quite glad I have the weekend to recover, though- I suspect one day more of this might finish me off. You know what they say – learning to run does put you in a dog eat dog world, and sometimes you feel like you’re in the sewers, asking who am I to put myself through all this. Actually, I don’t know if anybody says that, but it’s probably a good note to end the week on.

Chocolate Fantine

Run 5 – The One With An Adventure In Time And Space

Thus far, the predominant theme I’ve found in my morning runs is how little I enjoy getting up in the morning to go running. When compared with the endless possibilities given by lying in bed, getting up to exhaust myself before breakfast seems somehow the worse option.

Today, though, was the start of a new week, as Wednesdays often are. And I was most intrigued by how this week was going to go, given the promise of the website for Week 3. Namely, this week’s “workout” (I don’t feel like I’m doing enough to make that the right word for it, but anyway) involves a 5 minute warmup, then two lots of 3 minutes running, 2 minutes walking, 1.5 minutes running, 2 minutes walking, 3 minutes running, 1 minute walking, and then a 5 minute warmdown. This in and of itself wasn’t overly exciting – what did interest me was the fact that this is advertised as taking 27 minutes in total (and indeed today’s podcast was only 25 minutes). I was most interested to see how they intended to fit 35 minutes worth of things to do in that time.

Fully expectant to be having a Time Lord in my ear today, I set out, bemused but interested to see what was going to happen. Maybe I would learn that one of the tricks of the trade is that time doesn’t work the same for runners as it does for normal people. Perhaps when people run marathons it actually only takes them five minutes from their perspective, it’s just because we’re watching them that it seems so much longer. I was quite excited to become a time traveller, I haven’t been one since next year.

But sadly, in order to discover my new-found powers, I would have to go on a run. (Or, you know, just listen to the podcasts at home in bed. But given the quality of music, having pain in your legs and no oxygen in your lungs can often serve as a pleasant distraction).

The first surprise of the day came during the first three minute run. Chad (the voice on my iPod) had been his usual verbose self, greeting me with a cheery “Warm-up” and then “Run”, and I was perfectly ready for this to be the extent of our communication. But suddenly, in the middle of the run, the music faded out and Chad expanded his vocabulary at me, uttering the wise words of “Two minutes left”. (OK, fine, it wasn’t exactly in the middle of the run.) A minute later I was treated to another new word, with “One minute left”. This was a relatively pleasant development – although for three minute runs I’m not likely to lose how long I’ve been running, on longer runs regular input could be quite useful in helping me to keep track of how I’m doing. Although on a half-hour run I suspect an update every minute might get a bit annoying, so hopefully Chad will discover the gift of silence around that point.

The second surprise came once I’d finished the 1.5 minute run, when Chad came back to inform me that I was “half-way through”, before sending me off on a 3 minute run which was followed by a claim that I was approaching my “last run”. I’d been tricked by this before, and wasn’t quite prepared to believe him, but indeed after one more 1.5 minute run he told me to “warm down”.

This change of pace was somewhat unexpected. It means that this week I’ll only be running for 9 minutes, the same length of time I was doing in the first week (admittedly here in more concentrated bursts). I almost felt a little bit cheated. If I’m going to get up at ridiculous o’clock in the morning, at the very least I want to feel like I’ve done a level of exercise worthy of the time.

On the other hand, the reduced demand on the legs is probably no bad thing. I suspect that I’m not built for physical exertion. The last time I went running I found myself with pretty much constant leg aches and sporadic pains until I stopped for an extended period of time, and it looks like they’re starting to remember this again. My warm-down walk was fairly slow (and a bit longer than normal because, having expected a longer run, I was in the middle of nowhere when I was told to stop), and when I got back I had a nice lie down in bed for about 15 minutes until I felt keen enough to get up again.

In a way, this is a good thing, though. It means that I can be fairly sure that I haven’t missed an opportunity for a career as a marine, or an Olympic athlete, or a not-having-leg-pain-after-running specialist (it’s a job. Probably.) I seem to have a body that’s built for working in an office, and I can cope with this. Sadly, though, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get a job as a Time Lord either; both because it looks like the secret of time travel is a bit more complicated than the podcasts seem to suggest, and also because that too seems to be a job that requires a lot of running, from the documentaries I’ve seen on the BBC.

Peter Garibaldi

Run 4 – The One In The Wild

Day 4, and I have been continuing my journey to infiltrate the species known as ‘Enthusiasticus Runna”, more commonly known as the morning jogger.

The joggers are known to operate at all times of day, but this particular species is known for its early rising. It often wears bright plumage at this time of year to stand out from the darkness, presumably to advertise its presence to nearby cars. Sometimes they can be found with earphones in; our working theory is that this reduces the number of operation senses, and thus reduces the chance that their body works out what they’re doing and tries to put a stop to it.

The main mode of transport of the species is a medium-pace run. On the cut-out-and-keep speed charts that come with the paper version of this blog, it lies somewhere between “Stationary” and “Light speed”, which will hopefully give you an idea of the speed of travel. Despite this very narrow band, there do appear to be various sub-classifications within this species, as they frequently vary in pace, as well as the distance travelled.

I have been attempting to blend in with these creatures. I possess my own brightly-coloured coat with which I hope to mimic their appearance, although the mornings have been too warm to use this thus far. With the oncoming darkness early on in the day, though, it may be worth wearing this soon lest I have an unfortunate incident with a carnivorous van in a dark street.

I have also invested in earphones, and a suitably-researched soundtrack. After spending a considerable amount of time deciding what the sounds of the wild are most likely to be, the designers evidently concluded that thudding basslines and electronic sounds were the ones most likely to blend into the background noise.

My audio guide Chad has been talking me through some of the rituals that they go through as they begin their activities. They seem to begin with a “Warm-up”, which is enthusiastically announced. This appears to resemble a walk, except that… no, actually, it really does seem to just be a 5 minute walk.

After this, my induction into jogging begins. At this stage I am still very low in rank and as such am unable to run for extended periods of time, no longer than a couple of minutes at a time. Some very highly trained individuals are able to run for upwards of 40 kilometres in a go, all whilst wearing the fluorescent car repellents. Although the feat is impressive, this does show that the species is somewhat uninquisitive – had these very able people investigated the cars more closely, they may have found a faster and less painful way to travel the same distance.

However, I believe the experiment is going successfully, and the group may be beginning to accept me as one of their own. This morning, in one of the fits of running between sessions of being exhausted, I saw one of the pack jogging the other way.

In such cases, there is an element of power play. When both joggers are running the same way, it becomes what is known as a “race”, whereby the person behind attempts to run fast enough to overtake the one in front, and the one in front has to stop this from happening. I am not certain, but I suspect that if an overtaking occurs, the loser has to give the winner their jacket, so you can tell who the most successful joggers are by how many coats they are wearing. I have yet to experience a jogger with more than one which makes me think that this place must be fairly far down on the foodchain.

I know of no such “race” equivalent for two joggers running towards one another. Generally this ritual seems to involve each jogger committing to a single side of the path and attempting to pass each other without falling off, rather like the ancient sport of jousting, except that lances appear to not be encouraged and horses are deemed to be cheating.

This process reaches its apex at the point of passing, whereby one jogger will utter a (usually relatively breathless) “Morning!” to the other. If there is sufficient respect between the two, the second will reciprocate. I attempted this ceremony this morning and achieved success, hearing a “Morning!” sent straight back to me. Even more impressively, this woman appeared to be much less tired than I was, meaning that I had the respect of somebody much higher up the food chain than I. Although I would have thought I might not actually be on the food chain as people probably don’t want to eat something bathed in sweat.

On the way back to the observatory, I encountered a more common “Canine Exercisium”, or dog walker. I attempted the same procedure but was not reciprocated. Presumably to gain the trust of this species I need to carry around a small hairy lick-y object of my own.

There is clearly much more research to be done here.

David Ate-a-bar-o’ Chocolate.

Run 3 – The One In Narnia

This morning was early.

I suspect the false start on Wednesday followed by running on Thursday and today has probably not helped my body’s perception of things; nor has its curious refusal to go to sleep before about 12.30am. Whatever the cause, when the alarm went off at 6:40 this morning I was none too pleased.

Actually, I started off being more confused than displeased. I’d been at church small group the previous night and I think my dream at that point involved me still being there, and I think I woke up halfway through making a point, to the point where I may have woken up talking. It took me a minute to work out what was happening, and from there it took me about a millisecond to decide that I wasn’t ecstatic about this. Whose stupid idea was it to have a blog about running? I definitely should have started a thrice-weekly blog about naps instead. I could have been the Napster and made sleep-based puns at the end. Maybe it’s not too late for this…

Alas, for now I am stuck with committing to actually get up and run in the mornings. So, with a fair deal of reluctance, I threw on some shoes, before realising that throwing shoes at yourself doesn’t actually help and instead putting them on my feet.

I also realised that I hadn’t downloaded the right podcast for today. There is a separate podcast for each run, which seems slightly odd given the minimal amount of input for each run. Chad, the friendly American voice who won’t use four words when one will do, and who won’t express any sentiment requiring more than ten, says exactly the same thing in each podcast, and I guess the only variation would be in the music that’s played.

The NHS podcasts I used last time often had relatively friendly tracks, stuff that wouldn’t be out of place in an alternative-universe Heart FM. These podcasts rely on high-tempo electronica, which is admittedly not too bad for running to. As an indication of roughly how valuable they find this music, though, I’ll say this; the podcasts I’m using are free. Alternatively, you can download an app which allows you to choose your own music instead, which you have to pay £1.99 for. Thus they seem to put a negative value on the music I’m listening to – it’s like a more extreme U2. It’s certainly a strange situation to be in where listening to a free album whilst running (with audio prompts) is more expensive than listening to what they provide.

Today was the same running program as yesterday, the key difference between the days being the lack of enthusiasm. It’s impressive how much harder running becomes when you really would rather be in bed. Nonetheless, I went out and trudged through the alternating 60- and 90-second runs of general disappointment.

Another thing that was different today was the route. The last time I was running I would plan out my route the night before. This time out, the first two runs were just along one of my default routes. I figured this one should try and take a different way, but it turns out there really aren’t that many new and interesting places to run near where I am, since I’ve used all of the obvious ones. So this time I decided to just go for a run, and whenever I came to a junction of some description decide then where I fancied going.

This worked relatively well, actually, and although I was going along roads I knew fairly well, it felt slightly exciting to be able to choose where I was going to perspire across, and possibly expire next to.

That is, until I found the footpath to Narnia.

It’s a footpath I’ve passed quite a few times before, and every time I’ve been surprised to see it, as I’m fairly sure it’s not on Google Maps and I could never quite think where it went. However, every other time I’ve been near it I’ve had a route in mind, so I’d go straight past it. Not today, though. I thought I’d see what wonders awaited me on the other end of it. And I was not disappointed.

As I crossed it, it was a like a bridge into another world. (Bother, I should have called it the Bridge to Terabithia instead. Except I suspect that that’s slightly less well-known than Narnia, and also quite a bit more depressing). There were roads and houses and grass and trees and cars. It was like all the other streets that I’d run down, except that this one was not quite the same. Not in any particularly eerie way, it was just a different street. Oh, and there was a dragon.

Fine, a faun.

OK, it was a woman walking a dog. But I’m sure it’s a different woman that I’ve not seen before, and thus presumably a different dog as well. Unless they do some sort of dog sharing service in this new and mysterious land.

This new and exciting land was pretty cool in my mind for three reasons. Firstly, it’s Narnia and that’s pretty cool. Secondly, I’ve run around the streets near my house so often that it’s quite nice to find somewhere a bit different to run. Thirdly, I couldn’t quite place in my head where this place should be. In the image of the local geography I had in my mind, there just wasn’t room for this street to exist.

Like a slightly sweatier Captain Cook I decided to explore this brave new world I had discovered (and then I decided to write about it like a slightly sweatier Aldous Huxley.) (Incidentally, I googled Huxley to check the spelling of his name, and also to see whether he looked like he’d be more athletic than me. His Wikipedia page describes the genres he writes in as “Fiction. Non-fiction.” I feel like this hasn’t narrowed things down too much).

Having explored this street a bit more, it turns out that Narnia actually lives down a small turning a couple of roads away from where I live – it’s just another turning that I often run past and then forget about. It seems to fit quite well there, so that’s a point for town planners. A somewhat anti-climactic ending, but perhaps this is foreshadowing for an exciting event in a couple of weeks where Narnia rises up and revolts against the nearby corner shop. It probably isn’t, but it might be.

Beyond that, the run was fairly uneventful, and the run ended as it started, in a spectacular medley of exhaustion and indifference. Hopefully some time for napping over the weekend will result in a more cheerful Monday blog.

Cillary Black

Run 2 – The One With The Bonus Run

Today’s run was slightly delayed due to yesterday morning being very soggy. Somewhat disappointingly it rained very heavily between 6 and about 7:30, which meant that pretty much as soon as I’d decided I wasn’t going for the run, it stopped. I don’t quite know how Laura managed to get control of the weather but she’s done a good job.

A quick recap of the first time I ran so that the last paragraph makes sense – Laura was the voice of the last podcast I used, and I’m fairly sure I must have set her house on fire or stolen her car or something, because she never seemed to like me. Why else would she put me through so much physical pain over nine weeks?

I did enjoy the NHS Couch to 5k podcasts, but I thought I’d try a different set of podcasts this time round, if nothing else so it doesn’t feel like I’m going backwards with my progress! Thus, this time round I’m using Ease Into 5k.

The key difference between these podcasts and the NHS ones is that they are substantially more businesslike. There are two creators, who the website assure me are called Alex and Tanya, and two voices on the podcast, one male and one female. The woman identifies herself at the start as Tanya, and the man doesn’t name himself so I’m left to guess what his name is. I think I’ll call him Chad, because he is extremely American.

They both are extremely American, actually. Tanya informed me in the first podcast that I should check with my “health care professional” if I was worried about doing exercise, which struck me at the time as a very American expression, although my housemate subsequently assured me that it is used here quite a lot as well.  The accent is also definitely from the USA, which was what initially tipped me off that they were American.

It appears that Tanya was only there for the very first podcast, though, and disappeared after about a minute of generic dispassionate advice. Instead, I’m left with Chad, who is a man of very few words. His entire vocabulary genuinely consists of “Run”, “Walk”, “Warm-up”, “Warm-down”, “You’re half way there” and “Last run”. The whole process is made much more entertaining by the fact that his voice reminds me of the one that gives you instructions in “Bop It”, and if you don’t know what Bop It is then what on earth are you doing reading this blog when you still have so much of life to discover?

Anyway, I undertook my second run of this new regime today with Chad, the man who clearly wasn’t paid by the word for his time on this project. One slight disadvantage of this method is that if you haven’t looked it up before you have no idea how long you’ll be running for in the session. Apparently this time round was 60 seconds running, 90 seconds walking, 90 seconds running, 90 seconds walking, which was a slight step-up from Monday’s run and definitely pretty much hit my current level of fitness. It’s slightly saddening to think that the residual fitness from the running I did has managed to graduate me beyond the first week, which their website specifically describes as “That’s it. Anybody can do that”.

Still, amid shouts of “Run!” and “Walk!” and “Spin it!” I did the range of exercises that Chad shouted enthusiastically in my ear.  Even starting off today, I felt quite a bit more tired than I had on Monday, and by the end I was definitely aware that my fitness had taken a sharp dive off a cliff - although I’m technically now starting to climb that cliff again, so maybe diving off a cliff isn’t the best analogy. Possibly it’s more like bungee jumping. Except that coming back up with bungee jumping isn’t too much effort, but with the disadvantage that you don’t get back up to where you were before. So maybe it’s a bit more like bungee jumping from halfway up a cliff, and then at the nadir of the jump clinging on to the cliff-face and making a painstaking way back up, hopefully past where I jumped off before and on to the top of the cliff. Yeah, that works. Self-analogy-five. Incidentally, I definitely feel like cliff-face should be one word, but then you’d either need to remove one of the ‘f’s, which would be very sad, or have three ‘f’s in a row, which would be eccentric. I suspect it’s probably supposed to be written cliff face, but that feels too separate, and also like an insult you’d use if you wanted to imply somebody looked a bit too much like Cliff Richard, so I’m hyphenating it instead. Although I reckon I’d rather look like Cliff Richard than an actual cliff-face, so perhaps it’s not quite as a bad an insult as it sounds. I think I’ve got a bit distracted here.  Where was I? Ah yes, running.

Essentially, the gist of that last paragraph was that running is tiring, even though I’m not doing very much at the moment. And there’s definitely a big mountain to climb before I’m going to be even close to considering committing to the 10k. A big mountain with a huge carving of Cliff Richard in the side, like a 60s rock-and-roll Mount Rushmore.

One thing that didn’t help was that Chad’s very limited vocabulary led to somewhat of a miscommunication between us. Since one of his stock phrases is “Last run”, I naturally assumed that when he told me that that it would be the last run. This is the price I pay for getting running advice from a children’s toy. What he actually meant by that was “Last set”, the set consisting of two runs. Thus, I put all my energy into a half-sprint for what I thought was the last run, took a nice recovery walk, and then Chad shouted at me to “Run!” again for 90 more unexpected seconds. Well, it ended up being more like 80 because I got the call to jog just as I was approaching a nice smartly-dressed man with his dogs and figured running headlong at him might concern him a little bit.

I’ve survived thus far, though, which is a good sign. I’m definitely not going to skip another week (I decided to leave the rest of the Week 1 podcasts and move straight to Week 2) but I feel like Week 2 is roughly the level of fitness I currently have. Indeed, I definitely feel too week 2 admit that that pun was not worth straining for and perhaps here is a good place to wind up the blog for today.

I’m still determined to do three runs this week, though, so I’ll be heading out again tomorrow. My intention at the moment is to run Monday, Wednesday, Friday every week to match the 3 runs a week the podcast recommends, but shift it slightly so that I start the new week’s podcast on the Wednesday, so that Monday’s run is a consolidation run rather than a new and unpleasant experience. Save that nonsense for mid-week.

So, barring freak thunderstorms or my muscles taking Chad’s advice to “Pull it!” or “Twist it!”, I shall be back again tomorrow.

George Sake

Rain (briefly) stops play

I woke up this morning to go for run number 2 and discovered a rather large amount of rain. According to the BBC it stops by about 8, which means it appears to be rain specifically designed to stop me from running this morning. Since tomorrow seems to be drier I'll be heading out Thursday and Saturday this week instead.

No pun name sign off today because I already can't afford to use too many of them, my stocks are dwindling rapidly and it's only Week 1.

Reboot: Run 1 - The One Where I Started Again

I feel like the opening paragraph of the restart of the blog should be something deep and profound. Something that encapsulates the grandioseness of the voyage I’m undertaking, like the opening of Star Trek, or a made-up word that explains the size of the task ahead, like “grandioseness”. Unfortunately I’m two sentences into the opener already (now well into the third) and it’s far too late to change so this’ll have to do.

That’s right, I am back on the running horse, although that metaphor makes it sound like I have a horse whilst I’m running. This would make it easier if I was riding it, and significantly harder if I had to lead it.

Some background for those of you who are new to this blog – around the New Year I decided to try and build myself up to running 5k, which I did over the course of 9 joyful weeks, where I chronicled each run in a diary that many are calling modern day’s answer to Samuel Pepys, or rather the question “What is being written today that isn’t as culturally significant or interesting as Samuel Pepys’ diary?”.

This blog then mysteriously stopped around that point – but never fear, reader! I shall give you a quick update of all the running I have done since then.

…

Well, that didn’t take long.

Yes, sadly the running somewhat fell off once I’d finished blogging – once the podcasts ran out I found that I didn’t have the energy to go out and chase them. And so it remained for six months or so.

So what was it that drew me out of my self-induced stupor and back into the world of running? In a word, madness. In two words, I’d probably just add the word insanity. If you asked me to say it in three words, I’d ask you why, because I think it’s abundantly obvious from the previous answers the general gist that I’m going for.

Essentially I have verbally agreed to take part in a 10k next March/April time. This is quite frankly a ridiculous idea (hence the descriptive words in the previous paragraph), and I figured that if I had any chance of covering that distance, and covering it in a vaguely respectable time, I should start running again now. Thus, the aim is by Christmas to be able to run 5kish consistently, and from there to build up to the 10k in early 2015. Then I’ll probably do the 10k and retire from professional sports. That’s the dream.

It was with this in mind that I set the alarm this morning (6:45, not too early) to start my first jog of this new training regime.

Those of you who read my last chronicles of suffering may recall that I used a series of podcasts from the NHS, with a person called Laura who made it her personal goal in life to make me suffer. We didn’t always get along. This time round, I’m going to try a slightly different series of podcasts called “Ease into 5k”. I’ll get on to talking about how that differs from the last series I used in a future blog post – what I will say for now is that they promise to get me running 5k in 8 weeks rather than the 9 that it took me last time. The jury is still out on whether that’s actually possible, we shall see.

I decided to start from the first podcast to see if there was any residual fitness left over from the last time I went out running. The first week is 9 sets of 60 seconds running followed by 90 seconds walking. Last time, when I hadn’t done exercise since approximately the time when S Club 7 broke up, this was more than enough to absolutely exhaust me, and I was interested to see if it would do the same this time round.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised at how fine I felt after the first few sessions. Evidently something in my brain remembered what I’d been doing before, because 60 seconds of running felt much shorter than it did the last time I tried it. It felt like I was just starting to get into a rhythm when the run was suddenly over and I was walking again. At one point half-way through I decided to keep going past when it told me to walk, and ended up running for 2½ minutes, stopping just as it told me to run again. I was quite pleased with this, and it also felt a little bit like rebelling against the system.

Towards the end, though, and perhaps fuelled by over-exuberance, my body did start to ache a little bit. Not in an “I’m exhausted” way (by the end I definitely could have kept going for a bit longer) but in a “Right, I see what you’re doing here. We made a committee to discuss this, and the general consensus among the rest of your body parts is that we’re really not very happy about all this” sort of way.

I feel like perhaps my body didn’t quite understand what was happening at the start, which explains why it might have felt OK to begin with:

Ah, running. Good idea, there’s probably a bear chasing us or something. Being eaten by a bear definitely ruins your morning, so it’s probably best to get jogging for a while.

Great, we’ve stopped now. That was close. Back to pleasant walking. Isn’t this a lovely morning? Bit cold but… oh, wait, we’re running again. Bear must have caught up. Fair enough, they are often quite persistent. Nothing a bit of light jogging won’t solve, let’s make this feel pleasant. No being eaten today, Mr Bear.

Yep, all escaped this time. There’s no way that bear’s finding us now that we’ve run away from it twice.

Hm, looks like it has. This is strange, actually, it reminds me of a few months ago when we used to be out three times a week in the morning to run ridiculous distances. Glad he hasn’t taken any silly notions to try that recently…

…

Oh no.

Despite body protestations, I finished relatively happy, feeling relatively comfortable, and confident enough that I’m going to move straight onto Week 2 next time out, which will almost certainly be too much effort and cause me to regress, weeping, to a week with a negative number. But we shall see.

Last time on the blog I signed off every entry with a running-based celebrity pun name. Unfortunately www.runningbasedcelebritypunnames.com is now defunct and it redirects to www.namesofcelebritiesthatcanbechangedslightlytosoundlikeavegetableorotherfoodstuff.org.nz, which will have to do for now.

Caulin Flowerell

Week 9 Run 3 – The One Where I Ran 5km

 Time for another spoiler alert: if you don’t want to know whether or not I ran 5km, quickly invent a time machine, go back to about ten seconds before now and smash your laptop before you get a chance to read the title. Also, don’t read the next paragraph because I’m going to tell you there that I did run 5km this morning. Oops.

But yes, I finally managed to travel 5km using only my legs and without vehicular assistance, for the first time in my life!

To celebrate this occasion, allow me to give you some fun facts about 5 kilometres:

·        It’s far.

·        Really far.

Well, that’s it for fun facts about 5 kilometres.

Today’s run was quite exciting, if nothing else because everything was shrouded in fog which made it feel a little bit like I was jogging through a horror film. Maybe Romero’s “28 Minutes Later” would have been fitting; a fairly short film describing how one man jogged through the zombie apocalypse in a place where there weren’t any zombies, thus it looked just like somebody running through fog. I think that’s a great idea for making any film into a zombie film – just pretend that it’s happening elsewhere in the world and it just so happens that everybody we’re seeing in the film is immune or something. And then when the camera stops rolling you assume that’s because everybody’s been eaten by zombies. Depending on the film (I’m looking at you, Aeon Flux!) this could be somewhat of a relief.

As I mentioned in my last post, I did this route on Wednesday to try and pace it out, and as I was running it again today I realised that I’d remembered more than I thought I had about where I was at various times. I know I started faster yesterday because 5 minutes in I was about 50m further back than I had been then. I didn’t let this dishearten me, though, because I knew that I’d worn myself out quite a bit on Wednesday, so as long as I didn’t wear myself doing something stupid like trying to run 5km, I should be OK.

Somebody asked me once what I think about when I’m running. I considered this question a bit as I was running, and it turns out that either I can’t remember what I’m thinking about because I’m not paying attention to that, or I’m paying attention to what I’m thinking and I’m thinking about wondering what I’m thinking about. So hopefully that answers that.

At the 10 minute mark, I reckon I must have been in pretty much the same place, and I don’t remember where I was at the 15 minute mark on Wednesday so that wasn’t much use for measuring. I do remember today being very tired coming up to 20 minutes in, which I realised when I started crossing a road and wasn’t really sure if I was moving or not. I didn’t really seem to know what to do with legs, which is odd because I’ve had legs for as long as I can remember and don’t generally have issues with knowing what to do with them.

The final ten minutes, I felt I was going stronger than I had been on Wednesday, which was a good sign. I even managed to overtake the same people that I overtook on Wednesday, in roughly the same place, as an omen to keep going.

My optimistic target coming in to today’s run was to finish in under 30 minutes, but that seemed very unlikely right up until the final 5 minutes, when suddenly it seemed possible for a brief moment. It’s amazing what oxygen deprivation can do to you; I couldn’t quite finish in that time, ending up with a final time of 31:05. It’s practically glacial, but I finished. I’m counting that as a win.

Alas, this brings me to the end of my journey with Laura. At the end, she still resolutely refused to suggest recommending this to a friend, instead opting for “anyone else you know who wants to make the same progress you have”, which is a bit different. She also casually suggested that in future I could either run with my own music or relisten to old podcasts – she’s not prepared to let go yet!

Unfortunately for her, I think I am ready to let her go – after all, I can’t hold her back any more, I’ll just have to turn away and slam the door. Hey, that would make a good song!

With thanks to James Blunt (possibly the world’s least common start to a sentence), here is my departing thought to Laura:

Will I disappoint you

If now I say

I don’t want to listen

To a fake Coldplay

For ten weeks we ran

Through thick and thin

Though I put most of the effort in.

But now we’re over

And I will stop there

Oh, I’ll still be running

But you’ll be elsewhere

You shared my tears, you shared my smiles.

You made me run three point one miles.

You criticised my running style

I’ve been offended by you

I have felt joy, I have felt pain

You’ve driven me slightly insane

And now you’re gone, I have moved on

I have to say this to you:

Goodbye, my Laura

You’re not my friend

But you made me run

And you made me run for free

Goodbye, my Laura

This is the end

I’d say it’s been fun

But I don’t lie easily

In all seriousness, though, despite my constant complaining about Laura, she has managed to get me from a couch to running 5km in ten weeks (with a break in the middle) which is quite impressive. So if you decide that you fancy trying the same thing, you can do a lot worse than her. (And if you do, let me know if she mentions me).

Thanks is also due to anybody who’s read this blog over the past ten weeks. It makes it a bit easier to get motivation to run if you’ve got to write about it afterwards, and it makes it easier to write about it if you know that there are people who will read it.

So where now? I haven’t completely decided yet, I have a few ideas floating around for what to set as my next target, and I also don’t know whether I’ll write about the next one yet, so I don’t want to commit to anything yet; but I’ll post on here if I decide to keep going. I feel like I should leave you with a deep, insightful comment to cap off the couch-to-5k plan, so here it is:

5 kilometres is a long way!

Des Finish Line-am

Week 9 Run 2 – The One Where I Overtook

Let’s start with the headline news: I ran 2.9 miles this morning. Second story: I was overtaken by a very enthusiastic runner. Third story: I sort of overtook a runner back, except I didn’t. Weather: Foggy with a chance of overexposition. Full story below.

Ah look, we’re below. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. But I’ll scowl at you a bit, because I’d quite like to have been sitting comfortably this morning rather than running. It took almost ten minutes to get out of the house this morning, which, bearing in mind literally all I need to do is get up and put on running gear, is impressively slow. Being impressively slow is not typically a good omen when it comes to preparing for a run.

I have a tactic for this run and Friday’s run, which is to run the same route both times. My main issue is that I generally don’t know how far I’ve been running, and thus I don’t know if I’ve hit 5km, so I’ve rectified it by doing the route for the first time today, checking how far I’ve actually run, working out how far I would need to go to finish off (in this case, about another 300m) and do that on the Friday. You might say “Surely you could measure out the route beforehand”, to which I would reply “Possibly, but the warm-up walk throws the distance out of whack because I don’t know how far I cover in that time.” To which you might say “But you could measure how far you cover in 5 minutes the last time out”, to which I say “Woah, mister! Who do you think I am, Measuring Man?” To which you might say “Excellent point, well made, I retract all of my earlier claims. Here’s £20”. To which I say “Thanks,” because I’m as good at being thankful as I am bad at measuring things.

The less facetious advantage to pacing it out in advance is also that I get some idea of landmarks. I get told every five minutes what the time is, and if I can remember where I was at those timestamps the last run out, I know how close I am to doing the pace I need to be doing to get through 5km in 30 minutes. Sadly I was about as good at remembering to think about this as I am good at measuring things, and thus this best laid scheme of mice and men gang aft agley. In other words I have no idea where I was at any point along the run.

I have, however, established how far I would need to run, and with a warm-up walk like I had this morning the end point is actually my house, which is quite nice. Thus on Friday, my aim will be to run the full 5k, even if the podcast runs out by the time I get there (which, given current evidence, is likely).

Today was a slower run; I managed to get a stitch somewhere ridiculously early (between the 5 and 10 minute mark) which meant I had to focus on my breathing for a while. I also started too fast, as I am prone to doing, and thus was once again worn out by the 20 minute mark, although less so than I have been in the past. I think I’m still not a big fan of running.

As I was merrily jogging along with my stitch I had an experience which bizarrely I’ve managed to stave off for the past 9 weeks.

I was overtaken by another jogger.

And when I say overtaken, I mean properly overtaken. It wasn’t one of these long, drawn-out affairs where they gradually draw level, slowly pull away and eventually after a long battle of wills you let them slowly drift away into the sunrise. No, she was straight past me as if I wasn’t moving. My first thought was disappointment; my second was revenge. I was going to up my speed and catch this person back up!

That thought probably lasted in the region of three seconds before I realised she was much fitter than I was, going much faster than I was, and generally was not going to be visible for much longer. Indeed we turned a corner onto a road that wasn’t too long, and by the time I was halfway down it she’d already disappeared round the next bend.

So my first target to overtake somebody had failed. But I’m nothing if not determined, and therefore I’m probably nothing. But nonetheless I decided that I wasn’t going to take this lying down, and instead I would continue running – or rather “running” as I may have to now refer to it as having seen how much slower I do it than most people.

But my chance for revenge came a short while later. I was running down a road, when across the T-junction at the end, I saw a streak of blue. Another jogger! (Fortunately not the same one lapping me; that would have been disappointing but not surprising). And not too far ahead! Perhaps I could catch this guy and redeem myself!

I turned onto the road and he was already quite a way ahead, so I quickly abandoned this plan, and replaced it with a plan to continue running and not collapse, which was one I executed slightly more successfully. (Balance was not my strong point during the run today; during the warm-down walk I nearly fell off a kerb and during the run itself I had to do evasive manoeuvres to avoid a bush which leaped out at me).

And yet, a few minutes down the road, I saw in the middle distance a blue figure, walking. Could it be? Could he have worn himself out and be doing a recovery walk? Could I overtake him and thus take the crown of Fastest Runner Out Of The Two Of Us At That Particular Point?

Now, there are some small potential questions to be raised at this point as to whether this was the same person. On the one hand, they were both wearing blue, which is a fairly strong argument. On the other hand, the jogging guy was a man and the person walking was an older woman who I think had a dog. So the evidence is fairly inconclusive either way. However, I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say that it was the same person, and I managed to overtake them whilst they were walking talking to their friend who also hadn’t been there before!

To celebrate this win, I ran for the remaining five minutes or so, stopped to try and appease my lungs who were threatening to go on strike and take my legs, and came back home for a well-deserved glass of water.

After all, it’s not every day you overtake another jogger!

Victory Pendleton

Week 9 Run 1 – The One Where I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

The final week began in a haze of tiredness. I was away in London over the weekend, which I very much enjoyed but meant that I didn’t get much good sleep on Saturday night. I didn’t quite manage to get to bed early enough on Sunday to compensate, so the alarm going off at 6:30 in the morning was about as welcome as… well, an alarm going off at 6:30 in the morning. So it took a few minutes for me to get ready.

What spurred me on through the hardest part of the morning other than the next 30 minutes and possibly everything after that as well, was the fact that it was a very nice morning. Not cold, clear skies, light – perfect weather for driving 5km which would have been by far the best choice of transportation rather than what I ended up going for.

Part of the issue with my weekend in London was that there was a reasonable amount of walking around; normally this would be fine, but I think it meant that my legs didn’t have time to recover from not running on Friday and decided to be extra painful this morning to make up for it.

As this is the final week, the runs today are what everything has been building up to – a straight 30 minute run, designed to take me around 5km. (Spoiler alert: today it didn’t take me that far). Furthermore, it’s the beginning of the end in my journey with Laura, the voice from the podcasts I’ve been following. This could be an unpleasant divorce.

For the run today I decided to go for the 5k route I’d planned out a couple of weeks earlier, on the route with lots of hills that almost killed me the last time I tried it. I wanted to see if it was any better backwards, and in some sense it was, but only in the sense that it extended the agony in one long slog rather than destroying me quickly in one steep hill.

You see, in this route there are a lot of slow hills that ascend/descend (depending on which direction you’re travelling, they don’t change themselves like some geographical equivalent of a train changing rails. Although that would be cool. Maybe if you were standing on one when it changed and it changed quick enough it would briefly feel like being on a bouncy castle. Although depending on how quickly it changed it would feel for a rather extended period of time like you’d broken your legs. I’ve lost my train of thought – it seemed to have derailed amongst the analogy. Let’s end this bracket, take a quick break and have another go at that sentence).

You see, in this route there are a lot of slow hills that ascend (or descend, depending on… wait a second, I think I’ve fallen into a similar trap before. It’s like Indiana Jones going into another temple a bit later on, seeing a massive boulder sitting just above the treasure he wants to steal. In that situation, he would be like “Yeah, boulder, I know what’s about to go down here. And guess what, Rocky? I brought my running shoes this week – and I’ve been doing the Couch to 5k plan so we could run for a little over 3 miles provided you were prepared to slow for hills. Which you probably are, because, you know, gravity.” Except that I’ve distracted myself again, so it would be like Indy sitting there thinking that, whilst Shia LaBeouf steals the treasure [and passes it off as his own] and runs away, and then Harrison Ford gets crushed by a large boulder, which fortunately is made out of polystyrene so it’s OK, but it’s still a bit of a bother for all involved. Where was I? Ah yes).

You see, in this route there are a lot of slow hills (do I mean slow hills? I’m meaning a hill which is fairly shallow, and Google doesn’t seem to recognise slow hill as a term. Maybe I should go for shallow hill instead, that probably means what I think it does. Although that then makes it a bit more reminiscent of water rather than a hill, which is not very helpful because the hills I’m referring to are quite dry. They do go near a river at one point, though. Oh look, it’s Shia LaBeouf again! Oh look, it’s a boulder! Ow.)

You see, in this route there are a lot of shallow hills (better), which if you’re running down them are fairly pleasant, and if you’re running up them they gradually wear you down like a boulder in Indiana Jones. There are also some steeper ones, which are fine to run down for a while, but nasty to run up. The direction I went last time, there’s a steep hill towards the end of the hilly part, followed by a gentle downhill part thereafter – having destroyed myself on the hill, I didn’t appreciate the nice downhill afterwards. Going the other way means that the nastiest hilly bit comes about halfway through, and I was expecting it and duly slowed down. (If anybody’s getting the audiobook version of this, that’s duly with a ‘d’. I don’t need to go introducing somebody called Julie to overcomplicate matters further with Laura.) (Audiobook goes on sale Monday, £25 from all good retailers which sell it)

The reverse route turned out to not really be much more pleasant than doing it forwards; although I had more energy when I was done with the hilly part this time round than was the case last time, I was still exhausted by the 20 minute mark, which meant I had to push through 10 more minutes of misery.

Still, I managed to do it, and even managed to avoid collapsing at the end (about the 25 minute mark I was starting to feel physically sick and thought I might have to have a brief nap on the pavement). I pushed through to the very last second when Laura told me I could stop.

30 minutes of running, and how did I feel? Elated? Delighted? Enthusiastic? You bet I didn’t! I felt like I’d just run for 30 minutes and wanted to have a nice sit down and remove all my aching limbs, leaving me with just a floating head.

But I realised something as I did my “brisk” warm-down walk (it hasn’t been brisk for weeks. It’s barely been motion). Throughout the past 9 weeks, I’ve managed to get through with an attitude every week that “What I’m doing now is the very limit of what I’ll ever be able to achieve”. I remember writing in my blog in the first week how I didn’t think I’d ever be able to run for more than a minute at a time, and typically most weeks I’d look at what was coming up next and think “I couldn’t possibly do that”. And somehow, despite every week feeling exhausted and like I was never going to get anywhere, I’ve managed to go over the course of this term from no exercise at all to being able to run 4.6km in 30 minutes. It’s a massively slow time of course, but I’m pleased with that for somebody who was completely averse to physical exercise before January. And despite feeling that 5km is about as far as I could ever run, there’s now something inside me that reckons I might be able to go further. The rest of me wants to find a surgeon to perform a motivationoscopy to get rid of that thing, though.

When I came back I spent a good few minutes just lying down on the bathroom floor, lacking the energy to get up. I didn’t want this post to end on too optimistic a note.

Barbara Strides-and.

Week 8 Run 3 – The One With The Headache

A short update this morning, essentially because this only counts as a run in the very loosest sense of the word. I woke up this morning with a nasty headache – it was a nice day, so I thought I’d go outside and hope that the fresh air would help it to ease a bit. Unfortunately when I went out I could pretty much feel it thumping through my head every time I took a step – and for those who are uninitiated in the way of running, there are quite a few steps involved in it.

I’d planned out my route, but very quickly I decided to readjust it for a shorter one that took me back past my house, in the vein of Monday’s run. This time, though, I couldn’t even bring myself to do that, and I stopped at about the twelve minute mark and walked back.

I was slightly disappointed to have the first morning where I didn’t complete the allotted run, but at least this wasn’t to do with being out of breath or unfit. (Although I don’t think I was particularly well this morning; I had a stitch-like pain in my side from the warm-up walk which was my first sign that things probably weren’t going well).

Having gone back home and had some paracetamol and lots of water, I’m feeling a bit better now, so hopefully it was just a short-term thing. Over the past two weeks I have now done the week 8 podcast three times, so I feel qualified to move on to the final set of podcasts next week – and the last three blog posts.

This time next week, I might be free from Laura forever!

Ache-illes

Week 8 Run 2 – The One With The Misplaced Thumbs

Yesterday was the beginning of an era. It’s a day that future historians will call “The Day I Got My First Pair Of Proper Running Shoes. And Some Running Socks”. For those of you who are confused by the name, yesterday was the day I got my first pair of proper running shoes.

And some running socks.

I went into Warwick and was very well looked after at Warwick Sports Shop (happy to give them a free plug, in exchange I’m more than happy to get some free stuff from them, just putting that on record). They analysed my gait, and apparently I have very flat feet. This would explain some of the difficulties I’ve been having in running – you try running in flippers and get back to me. I was then brought shoe after shoe after shoe to try (typically these came in pairs to make it easier) to see which felt the most comfortable. Given that the shoes I was comparing them with were the ones which have been systematically destroying my feet recently, anything was an improvement, but I picked a pair I liked.

I also picked up some running socks. I was slightly confused about what difference a sock makes to running but decided not to question it, especially when I was offered a three pack of socks which contained “a pair of socks worth £8, a pair of socks worth £11 and a pair of socks worth £13” (or some sorts of numbers). I had two questions I was too embarrassed to ask at that point:

1)      Who would pay £6.50 for a sock?

2)      What made the three socks have such different values? They all looked the same to me.

This seemed like too much stress for me; when I’m getting ready to run, how would I decide which one to wear? Do I need to decide in advance whether the day feels like an £8 day or a £13 day? Too much stress. I went for two packs of standard running socks, which all looked the same and cost the same which made me feel slightly more relaxed about paying £5 for a pair of socks. I’ve had cheaper restaurant meals.

Overall, I was happy, though –the shoes were cheaper than I was expecting to pay, and overall they seemed to be a good purchase. The only disappointment was that, despite being running shoes, they don’t actually run themselves. You need to run whilst wearing them, which is a shame. It’d be a lot easier if they just went themselves, like a hoverboard.

Anyway, I went out for a run this morning in my new shoes. And running socks. I would love to say that they made a dramatic distance and I can now run 5km in under a minute backwards whilst writing a Tony-award-winning play and solving world hunger. Sadly the play I wrote is off-Broadway at best and I’m only 80% of the way there with world hunger, so somewhat of a disappointment by comparison. The run was slightly more comfortable than before, though, so evidently the shoes must have been doing something. And the socks.

I managed to get through the full 28 minutes without getting too tired or slowing too much at one go, which meant by my estimates that I went 2.7 miles in that time. That did include an actual honest-to-goodness near sprint in the final minute when I realised I still had a little bit of energy left, but it makes me optimistic that maybe I could reach 5km in 30 minutes.

My main issue since I’ve restarted running is what to do with my thumbs, which sounds like a weird issue (mostly because it is). I can’t really remember what I did with my hands before my brief break from running – I’m fairly sure I tend to run with slightly clenched fists, because that seems to be the most comfortable and it also means I’m ready to launch a punch if I’m lynched by ninjas at any point. But the past couple of runs I’ve been clutching my thumb within this grasp, which has made them feel a bit sore at about the halfway point. They don’t feel so natural when outside the grasp of the other fingers, though – it feels a bit like I’m running with thumbs up like an energetic version of the Fonz.

This seems to coincide with the times I’ve been running without my glasses – maybe unbeknownst to me I’ve been keeping my thumbs in the frame of my glasses and I’m only just realising this. Further experimentation is needed, I think.

Shoey Lewis

Week 8 Run 1 revisited – The One With The Field Trip

Guess who’s back? Back again? To those of you who are expecting Slim Shady at the moment I’m probably going to be somewhat of a disappointment by comparison, but it’s actually me.

A week’s break has hopefully done me the world of good (it’s odd that I feel a lot better after a week of no exercise than I did after many weeks of exercise – support for my hypothesis that exercise doesn’t do you any good). My legs hurt a lot less than they did, I can walk on my foot again, and hopefully at some point this week I’ll get some new running shoes that don’t have a personal vendetta against my feet, which will hopefully spur me on to bigger and better things! (I’m thinking rollerskates might not be a bad idea)

Still, when 6:30 came around this morning, it was still a bit of a challenge to get out of my airbed (new mattress comes on Wednesday, this might be the most excited I’ve ever been about furniture), dig out the old running gear and go on the old jog-raphy field trip.

I optimistically set out on the same schedule as I had been on last week – a 28 minute run without stopping. I had no idea how fit I would be after a week off, since the last time I took a break from exercise it lasted around half a decade, but I thought I’d dive in at the deep end, because what’s the worst that could happen? Well, in the analogy, probably death by drowning or by being eaten by sharks, so maybe we should avoid allegories in this case.

It’s amazing how at this time of year, even a week makes a huge amount of difference to the light level, it was pretty much full daylight when I left the house. At least, I’m fairly sure that’s what it was, but everything was very foggy. I’d also decided that in an effort to reduce weight as much as possible and make my run easier, I’d go out without my glasses, so things were naturally slightly blurry anyway. The whole thing ended up with the impression of me running through a video game from the late 90s, a very Silent Hill vibe going on.

The pace was OK, and for the first half I wasn’t feeling too bad at all. However about halfway round I started to get quite tired, and with it I lost a bit of confidence in my planned route. It would have worked but would have committed me to running the full time and I didn’t know yet if I’d be able to do this – I didn’t want to be found on the pavement later half-eaten by a shark. So I decided to adapt like a universal adaptor, and take an alternative route that was shorter and would take me past my house at about the 20 minute mark, and I could decide then if I wanted to finish the run or not.

Unfortunately I got slightly confused about the route, missed the footpath I was aiming for and ended up in an alternative footpath that was going through a field. Although given the recent weather, field was an optimistic definition and it seemed a lot more like a mud factory.

The title of this blog is “the field trip”, and the punner within me would have been delighted if I’d fallen over at some point during this part of the run. The sensible tenth of me, though, didn’t want to make such sacrifices for comedy, and so the pace slowed quite substantially, to a walk in places, as I attempted to navigate, Bear Grylls-style, a field in rural Warwickshire. There were some worms and I wasn’t tempted to eat them, so I didn’t go full Grylls, but I did negotiate dangerous terrain (mud) and wildlife (there was somebody walking a dog I’d seen a couple of minutes earlier) in perilous conditions (light wind and only just above freezing) so I think that counts.

Having survived my harrowing ordeal (farming pun alert), I got back to the main business of the day, running. In a way, the field trip worked out quite well despite only being a minute or two, because it gave me a bit of time to catch my breath. Sadly a week away from sport meant my catching skills weren’t too good and it went away again shortly afterwards, but it was nice whilst it lasted.

I did summon up the willpower to pass my house and complete the full 28 minute run, although I was exhausted by the end. The air was so moist during the run that I could feel the water in my eyelids when I blinked towards the end, which kept me amused enough for the last couple of minutes to see me through to the end.

At the moment there’s very little in the way of leg pain (although that will come, it always does), and so hopefully I’ll be able to resume the final push towards the 5k target by the end of next week.

In other news, whilst driving in to university this morning I was temporarily stopped just before getting into the car park by two carefree ducks who wandered in front of my car and showed no signs of moving. I couldn’t quite find my horn to try and scare them off; fortunately some friendly passing builders came to my aid and shooed them off the road. Nothing to do with running but an interesting start to the day.

Alexander Pain (pun based on the Oscar-nominated director of Nebraska. I’ve never heard of him before but it requires minimal effort on my part and is vaguely topical).

No Run

Apparently sometimes, running with a large blister on your foot results in you hardly being able to walk on it in the evening. With that in mind, and the goal sometime next week of finding shoes that actually fit and aren't very old to run in, I've decided to take the rest of the week off running, and hope that an extra few days of rest will bring my muscles to a state of cautious relaxation before I shock them again on Monday.

Gloria Restefan

Week 8 Run 1 – The One Where Everything Hurt

Years ago, an ancient creator of wisdom by the name of John Michael Stipe wrote a piece of groundbreaking prose, which included the immortal line “Everybody hurts sometimes”. And even though the original source of this wise saying has been lost in the deep mists of 1992, the wisdom lives on, even 22 years later.

The upshot of that deep and profound saying resonating through the ages came back to me this morning as I started running. More than on any other day, things were hurting from the start and they didn’t really ease up too much as I went on. With strains in my right knee and left calf and a blister on my foot it was a promising start.

Today was the first 28-minute run, designed to push me towards 30 minutes next week and ultimately a 5km run (which still seems very unlikely in the allotted time, mind, but it’s something to aim for). In the back of my mind ever since I first started and looked at a route, there’s been a very nice one that I’ve wanted to take which is just under 3 miles. Obviously at the start that seemed far too far to be something I’d ever be able to complete, but I thought it would be good to scope it out today.

Turns out I’m glad I did, because it was not the ideal route for me.

Deep in the pre-iPoddian period of 1985, a predominant thinker of the age gave us the words “If I only could, I’d be running up that hill.” And although the singer may be no longer with us (note: I just checked Wikipedia and apparently Kate Bush is fine so that’s a relief) her words live on.

I have expressed before my general dislike of hills, and so I was very disappointed to discover just how hilly this route was. By normal standards, probably not too much but there were three separate uphill sections to traverse, the third of which was by far the worst, perhaps due to how I was dealing with it.

Often in the last minute of a run, Laura will encourage me to pick up the pace and try and finish on a strong note. Unfortunately I decided to take this tactic on the final hill, pushing myself to keep what little pace I had going. I might even have accelerated a bit as I went up the hill. It must have been less than a minute until I was at the top, but I’d managed to use pretty much all the energy and breath I could muster. Fortunately I was nearly done.

Oh, no, wait. I still had over ten minutes to go.

This tactical decision somewhat stunted my speed in the latter part of the run, meaning that despite the extra three minutes of running time I covered 2.6 miles, barely any more than last time. Looking at the route now, though, I reckon I was doing about a 9½ minute mile before the hill, and about a 13 minute mile afterwards, which is a deceleration from slow to essentially glacial. At the end it was essentially walking pace.

But I did manage to finish once again, which I count as a win. I was in a position where I would have to explain to Theodore Roosevelt that I was no longer a pony – in short, I was exhausted. My warm-down walk at the end was more of a hobble, since that was the best I could manage, and it took me another thirty-five minutes after I got back just to have a shower and get dressed.

The eminent historian and Nobel prize laureate Toni Basil once said “Hey Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey.” This doesn’t really relate to my situation in any way, but the words are timeless and full of wisdom.

At the start of the podcast, Laura laughably told me that I must be getting quite comfortable with long runs after the number I’ve been on. That number, for statistics fans, is six after today. When I had my sixth driving lesson, I wasn’t overly comfortable with driving. After six days at university I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with undergraduate mathematics. When I was six days old, my grasp of Shakespeare was at best flimsy. In short, I’m not sure that six times is quite enough to be getting the hang of something yet.

Seven, though, is another story (seven driving lessons and I was Jensen Button, seven days at university and I was Leonhard Euler, seven days old and I was William Shakespeare which made it a lot easier to interpret my own babblings) so I’m sure by Wednesday I’ll be flying along like Superman if he was forced to jog rather slowly instead of actually flying.

John Hurt (no adaptation required today)

The Mattress Saga

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Now this is a story all about how

My sleeping time got mixed around

And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there.

I’ll tell you how I came to sleep on a bed full of air.

Will Smith certainly does know how to have an interesting mattress story, and I think so do I.

Our story begins back in the distant annals of last month, when I received a letter from Argos informing me that my mattress has been deemed to be unsafe due to failing some fire safety regulations. I have to admit to being completely nonplussed by this state of affairs – to be honest, if there had been a fire in my room and my mattress had gone up in flames, I wouldn’t have been writing to the manufacturers complaining about the lack of fireproofing.

The letter offered some helpful advice on how to avoid any further danger, such as not smoking in bed and not surrounding yourself with lit candles before sleeping. I honestly worry that they even had to write that – when I fall asleep, I am comatose for a long period of time, and I tend to move around a bit. I also tend to be encased in lots of fabric-type stuff. Thus, I would be somewhat concerned about having open flames nearby, unless I fancied waking up on a pyre.

Still, I rang up and spoke to a very nice person from Argos who said that they would send me a replacement mattress, one that was a) more expensive and b) presumably impossible to set on fire or something like that. Their computer system was having a bit of trouble so I was told I’d receive a call the following day to arrange collection of the old mattress and delivery of the new one.

And so cometh the next day, cometh the telephone call. (I feel strange mixing Olde English and modern technology – has anybody connecteth to thine Internet recently?) I’d had a look at a couple of dates in the next week or so that I could do, maybe looking at something in very early February as a worst case scenario.

The best date they could offer me was Saturday 8 March.

This was somewhat of a surprise, but I figured that it was a Saturday, so that would probably be fine, and I agreed, hung up, went back to my desk, and immediately remembered that it was my friend’s stag do on that day. Literally the only Saturday I wasn’t going to be home. That was somewhat unfortunate.

So I called them back to rearrange the delivery. I gave them my order number, told them that the date didn’t work for me and could I reschedule it? Oddly enough the range of dates they had was completely different, and there was a slot free for today (22 February). I was pleasantly surprised and a bit confused that it hadn’t been available twenty minutes earlier, but I agreed and everything was rejigged.

The conversation itself was a bit painful because for some reason I could hear my voice over the phone from the other end, with a delay of about a second. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hold a conversation when everything you’re saying is played back to you with a slight delay, but it is astonishingly hard to form even basic sentences. So I may not have been at my most coherent and was quite keen to end the conversation without asking too many questions. This, as we will shortly discover, might have been a mistake.

I was assured that I would get an email confirming all of this. Which I didn’t (and later discovered that they actually can’t do, so I don’t know what the guy I was talking to was hoping would happen. Maybe a Nigerian prince might happen upon my order number in the process of informing me of the increasing number of very rich relatives who live in Africa and died without a will. Astonishing.)

Which brings me to today.

Around lunchtime the door rang. Well, the person at the door rang, if the door itself rang that would be an incredibly inconvenient experience. I came down and there were two gentlemen saying that they were there to collect the mattress. I asked if they were planning to deliver anything, and they said no. They weren’t wearing any uniforms or anything and I did wonder whether they were just out for a free mattress. However, it seemed unlikely that they would ring random doors on the off-chance that the residents were expecting to get rid of a mattress – and to be honest, if they had, then giving them one that you wouldn’t be allowed to light candles around would probably be due penance for their sins. So I passed the mattress on to them, and they said to ring up if I didn’t get a delivery.

I waited a couple of hours until another delivery I was expecting arrived, and then I decided to ring Argos again, at which point the tale derailed slightly.

You see, when I rang up to get my new mattress, they ended up creating a new order for it without telling me they were doing this, or informing me of the new order number. The original order number that I had for the first mattress I had bought referred only to the return of the first mattress; thus, when I rang up to rearrange the delivery of the new mattress, from the order number I gave them they took it to mean I wanted to reschedule the collection of the mattress, but not the delivery of the new one. Hence today’s mix-up.

I was told that the people who had collected my mattress were out of the area now and wouldn’t be able to return it (evidently they were well on their way to Spain cackling maniacally at the mattress they’d stolen, before disappearing into an explosion because one of them had been smoking) and so I would have to rearrange delivery.

After some haggling we agreed on a new date in a few days’ time for the new mattress to come, and they offered to get me a free airbed to tide me through until then. On the one hand this was quite a nice gesture from them; on the other hand without it I would have been sleeping on the floor for the next four days or so. They offered to deliver it to my local Argos store, which they deduced would be Didcot.

Now, Didcot is about an hour and a half away from where I live at the moment. It is, however, the closest store to my home address where my parents live. At this point I felt a little bit like some cats were having a small barbecue outside, because I was smelling a rat.

A little bit of further enquiry revealed that, although the collection of my mattress was arranged to be at the house where the mattress was at and had been delivered to (a sensible set-up, I thought), the new mattress was scheduled to be delivered to my home address an hour away. I have no idea how they even got hold of that address, since for the previous order everything had gone to Kenilworth where I live at the moment. The only place I can think of that the address would have appeared would have been the address for the cardholder, but somehow they managed to extrapolate from that that I want my new mattress delivered there instead.

So I managed to get that cleared up, which meant we had to rechoose delivery dates; this ended up with a week Wednesday being the next available free slot.

In the meantime, they called my nearest Argos store, in Leamington Spa, to set up the order for my air bed. In the meantime I Googled directions to the store, and worked out how to get there, before my Spidey senses started tingling and I thought it was worth confirming the postcode of the store.

It turns out that there are two Argos’s in Leamington Spa. And the one I’d found on the Internet was not the one that my air bed was going to. That could have been extremely awkward.

So, ending the call I drove into Leamington to collect my air bed. I managed to find the store without too much difficulty. When I got there and gave them my order number, they tried to charge me for it, and understandably looked a bit bemused when I told them that I was getting it for free. I didn’t blame them for doubting me, I wouldn’t have believed me. Fortunately, the person who had taken the call must have been around there and she was able to verify that it was something I was getting for free, and wished me the best in getting everything sorted out.

I brought the airbed back, and after a couple of false starts in inflating it (it has an inbuilt pump at one end, and, as I discovered after about ten minutes of pumping and confusion, a hole at the other end) it is ready to go. Distinctly uncomfortable, but it’s free so I can’t really complain.

So I now have 11 days to enjoy the pleasure of an inflatable mattress, which is much smaller than my bedframe and thus makes the slats rattle if I try and sleep on it. I have friends coming over next weekend and we’ll probably be in the bizarre situation where all three of us will be trying to sleep on the floor in my bedroom.

Oh, and I went on the Argos website just now to check that everything was OK, and the delivery address for the mattress is still set to go to the wrong address.

I don’t really get angry at stuff, so I’m finding the situation more amusing than anything. But I do suspect that over the next 11 days (potentially more if the mattress still gets delivered to the wrong place) I will grow to have a passionate dislike of airbeds. And a very strong desire to keep hold of the next mattress I get. And probably a desire to not use Argos to deliver things in future.