Week 4 Run 3 – The One With Lots Of Other Joggers

To adapt a quote from a certain Arthur Dent – “This must be Friday. I never could get the hang of Fridays.”

I don’t really understand what it is about them, but historically the Friday run always seems to be the worst run of the week. Last week I had issues with hills; the week before I was convinced Laura was trying to kill me; the week before that… actually, the week before that I was also convinced that Laura was trying to kill me. Maybe it’s Laura who isn’t a Friday person?

Anyway, I was utterly exhausted by about halfway through the first five minute run, which isn’t even halfway through the whole program for the day. The final five minutes were an exercise in survival that Bear Grylls would have been proud of (except that I didn’t eat insects or drink my own urine so maybe not). It didn’t help that I managed to take a left when I should have taken a right and ended up with a route that was about half a mile longer than I’d intended it to be.

I also had the slightly bizarre experience of seeing more joggers out this morning than I think I’d ever seen before. In the four weeks up until now I could probably count on one hand the number that I’d seen (and that’s not even using the trick where you count in binary instead and get potentially as high as 32) and this morning I saw at least five.

[EDIT: I have been reminded that counting in binary on my hands would only allow me to identify as many as 31 joggers - if I then see a 32nd then I'll be forced to forget that I've seen any at all (or use another hand, but that seems impractical.) Thus I will conclude that in every other run where I didn't count how many people I saw that I probably saw 32 and forgot about them, like the Silence from Doctor Who. Thus for today to have been remarkable I must have seen 37, except that that then wouldn't be that remarkable compared to 32. Assuming I'm using both hands to count runners I could identify as many as 1023 runners, so I'll assume that I saw 997 this morning (5 modulo 32), which means that whilst jogging this morning I passed 4.4% of the population of Kenilworth jogging the other way. Hopefully that makes everything better.]

I have a number of theories about this, in order from most to least feasible

-        The weather’s a little more pleasant now so people are keener to go for a jog.

-        On Wednesday the first outing of my fluorescent jacket was enough to dazzle several people in their beds as I went past; they saw how majestic I looked flying through the streets in a coat that would give Joseph a run for his money, and decided that they want that.

-        There was an epidemic of invisible monsters running amok in Kenilworth and the select few people who could see them were fleeing for their lives. In jogging gear.

-        Chance.

-        Community Chest.

-        I took a route that happened to cross the paths of more joggers – I did stay fairly near to the main road through most of this.

I was very, very tired when I got back to the house. Signs of this included struggling to keep my balance when doing the stretch that requires you to stand on one foot, despite the fact that I was holding on to a table at the time to steady me; and it taking about five minutes to convince myself to get up from lying down on the kitchen floor after finishing stretching. (I did genuinely consider what would happen if I just spent the entire day lying there instead of going in to university, and couldn’t really think of any consequences). I tried to motivate myself by thinking of the banana I could eat as a healthy snack when I got up – this may have contributed to my staying on the floor even longer than I would have otherwise done.

It’s not great when you find it easier to get out of bed in the morning than you do to get up off a cold wooden floor after running. To rectify this I’ve decided that tomorrow I will have a great deal of difficulty getting up in the morning, which will hopefully make me feel better.

The next two weeks are quite exciting because each run gets its own podcast, which means I’ll only get to hear each of Laura’s handy tips once, and the faux bands I hear, I’ll only hear once each. The downside is that next Friday she’s going to want me to run for 20 minutes without stopping, which I cannot see happening!

Hurt-my-knee Granger

Week 4 Run 2 – The One Where I Raced A Milk Float

This morning was very exciting. On Monday evening my exciting fluorescent jacket arrived, forcing me to learn how to spell the word fluorescent. (It’s from the Greek, meaning “Seriously? You put the ‘u’ before the ‘o’? Whatever, English language, go nuts.”)

Here is a link to it (make sure you put sunglasses on before clicking) - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005CNX2XW

This jacket is a thing of beauty and makes me feel very professional when I’m out running, and very visible. Not just to passers-by – I’m fairly sure now that when I go out in that, I become the man-made thing most visible from space.

Nevertheless, I braved the outside world again for another run of semi-murder. Today was still quite tiring (the same program as on Monday, so sixteen minutes in total spent running) with the usual combination of interesting faux music (today we had the delights of fake U2, and what I would tentatively suggest was fake Jay Z, except that that I can’t tell the difference between most rappers when I hear them so it may well have been actual Jay Z for all I know) and confusing advice.

The one that got me today was the advice for dealing with a stitch, which was to push your stomach out when you breathe in, and relaxing it as I breathe out. I’m sure the reason I’m being told to do this is because I don’t do it already, but I’m not sure that’s physically possible.

OK, I’ve just tried it sitting down and it’s actually not as hard as I thought it was. Maybe all the running was depriving my brain of oxygen and so I couldn’t work it out. But then surely if my brain was running out of oxygen, one of the last processes to be shut down would be the bit that works out how to get more of it. That’d be like making some redundancies at a restaurant by getting rid of all the chefs and just keeping the waiters. I’m sure Heston Blumenthal would still charge a fortune.

The exciting point in today’s run was chasing a milk float, which happened to be parked just up a road I started running down, and was moving in fits and starts down the road. It was good – I’d run past it, then it would finish delivering milk and drive past me, park further up the road and I’d run past again. It was like Usain Bolt against whoever ends up coming second against Usain Bolt.

Except that at one point (a fairly terminal point, in fact) the float overtook me, did a 3 point turn in a side road and started coming back the other way. That’s something you don’t see too often in the Olympics – Bolt getting halfway down the 100m track, turning around and heading back to the start line. He’s fast enough that he could probably do that and still win, but I reckon going in the opposite direction would be grounds for disqualification, and so I’m claiming the competition win and the corresponding gold medal there.

Who’d have thought it? Four weeks in and I’m already apparently faster than cars and Usain Bolt!

Run Wheezely.

EDIT: The automatically-generated URL for this entry is "One where I raced milk". Maybe a challenge for another day, albeit I suspect a somewhat easier one.

Week 4 Run 1 – The One That Was Not Fluorescent

Week 4. I did not really expect to get to week 4, to be honest, I thought I would have given up and gone back to bed long before now. Especially given today was cold; it was 2 degrees, with wind-chill making it feel like minus Norway outside – it’s the first time I was shivering during the warm-up walk (which, incidentally, I never feel warm after. Running for an extended period of time – that makes me warm! But they never call it a warm-up run. Come to that, I always feel warm in the bath or the shower or in bed. Why can’t they be my warm-up, rather than the one thing in the morning that doesn’t actually make me warm?)

Laura had some fun plans for me today. For those who have been reading these past few entries in a state of confusion (e.g. Alaska – I’d be confused if I was supposedly in the US but every time I tried to get anywhere else there was a Canada in the way), Laura is the disembodied voice that speaks to me whilst I run.

To make that sound slightly less odd, she is on an iPod. (Well, her voice is – although if she was standing on my iPod that would explain why running is so difficult, I’m moving for two). It’s part of a 9-week program that intends to get you running 5k, or destroy you in the process. I’m unsure at the moment which way it’s going to go for me.

Anyway, the scheduled run for week 4 involves, with walking breaks in between, running for three, then five, then three, then five minutes. For the non-mathematicians amongst you, that’s sixteen minutes in total. For the mathematicians amongst you, that’s still sixteen minutes in total (arithmetic is not subjective). In either case, this is more commonly known as “quite a lot of running”.

I did manage to finish it. The route I picked did involve another hill (I was sure Kenilworth was flat-ish before; I think somebody’s been raising the terrain when I wasn’t looking) to run all the way up – see last entry for what my thoughts on hills are – but I managed to survive that. I was halfway up when she told me I was halfway through my run, but in my mind I’d been running since approximately the dawn of time and was very keen to stop for a bit. She was having none of this.

Now the three-minute runs were not too bad; given that they were the killer last week, I worry that Laura’s gradually tricking me into being fit and active. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

On the subject of feelings, I’m starting to get a bit worried about Laura. At the end of the warm-up walk, she stuck around for far longer than she needed to, telling me I’d done well, telling me to drink water, telling me what to do if I get a stitch, telling me to look up stuff on the Internet if I needed something to help. She even said “I’m going to have to say bye now” and then kept talking – it was like a “You hang up! No, you hang up!” scenario.

I’m starting to worry that Laura’s forcing me to run ridiculous distances is the equivalent of primary school where a girl pushes you over in the playground because she secretly likes you. (This never happened to me at primary school, I was very good at staying on my feet). I worry that I’m leading her on – I do see her three mornings a week. I’m scheduled to see her on the morning of Valentine’s Day, for goodness sake! I’ve never been in the situation where I might be about to break the heart of a podcast…

Today was supposed to be the first run that I did in my nice new fluorescent running jacket – unfortunately this wasn’t delivered over the weekend. According to Amazon they did attempt delivery twice, to which I suggest that they didn’t try very hard. Call me a traditionalist, but I feel that it’s hard to claim that you’ve genuinely tried twice to deliver a package if in neither case did you actually, say, ring the doorbell. Maybe I’m expecting too much, perhaps I should just stand outside and wait for them? Or maybe go to a building where they keep all the merchandise they sell, pick it out for myself, and take it to them for them to scan and charge me there? That could catch on, actually, I should patent that.

My housemate did lend me a running jacket and I felt quite professional wearing it. I look forward to my one arriving, though, so that I can be running in a highlighter yellow jacket which will be visible to passing motorists and low-flying aircraft.

Hurry Potter

(Thanks to George for contributions to this week’s sign-offs).

Week 3 Run 3 – The One With The Stealth Hills

Today was supposed to be a fairly gentle, unexciting run, where I could talk about the amazing progress I’ve made over the past three weeks and how this has been a rewarding and enjoyable experience. I was hoping to finish with a nice, warm sensation in my chest.

Turns out the nice, warm sensation was heartburn. Laura’s not done yet.

I decided to take a deviation this morning – I started out on a route I’ve done before, but at a T-junction where I’d previously gone right, I went left instead. This was about a minute into the first three-minute jog of the day, the one that typically has gone OK before the utter exhaustion of the second one.

Well, this week I turned left and there was a hill.

First, the case for the defence of nature. We’re not talking a hill that was massive in length – it’s a railway bridge effectively, so it’s only going upwards for about 100m or so. And also in its defence, it’s probably been there a lot longer than I have.

The case for the prosecution, however, is that it is a hill. One of the things I’ve been enjoying so far about the runs I’ve been doing is that Kenilworth, at least the bits that I’ve found of it, is rather flat by and large. I know there are hilly parts, but I don’t think I could get to one if I tried. Also, the part of the run that I was on meant that I had to run the whole way up this – and it’s not a completely shallow hill. It might be to people with fitness, but it’s the steepest one I’ve had to run up thus far. It’s my own personal Everest.

In this little courtroom drama, being in the role of judge as well as chief prosecutor and attorney for the defence means that, shockingly, I find the hill guilty of one count of being there, and sentence it to continue to be there but to feel very bad for so doing.

Alert readers (so myself not included) will notice that Laura has not been prosecuted for this. After all, I reasoned with myself with what remained of the blood in my brain, she doesn’t plan my routes. She doesn’t know.

The next thirty seconds were pleasantly downhill while my lungs politely reminded me of the joys of air, and then I took my next left.

And there was another hill.

Two stealth hills!

I know it’s not good grammatical practice to have single sentence paragraphs.

But there were two hills!

Two!

I think I’ve made my point there. In conclusion, there were two hills.

Note that this is all in the same three minute running window, the three minute running window where I count it as a win if I’m still alive after it when running on the flat. And I’ve been running up n hills today, where n is famously 2 (see previous paragraphs for a proof).

Fortunately I only needed to go halfway up the hill before Laura told me I could stop and go for a three minute “recovery walk”. I tell you, at this point I didn’t need a recovery walk, I needed a recovery gurney.

But still, I wasn’t blaming Laura. She couldn’t possibly have known.

And then the music for the recovery walk started. And one of the first lyrics was “You take me higher. When I’m feeling low.”

She knew.

I don’t know how she knew, but she knew. I was trying to be generous with her, even when I heard her story about pretending you’re running next to a hedge and not bouncing for the third time this week. But maybe it’s like one of those songs that you play it backwards and it tells you to choose a hilly route the next time you run, and to wire her £500 as a consultancy fee.

This whole experience (and some would say this is running uphill for a couple of minutes, why are you making such a big deal about it? To which I would say: fair point, hypothetical person who is astonishingly critical for somebody who doesn’t exist. But I’ve got to write about something) can be summed up in a poem by Robert Frost, which can be adapted slightly for purpose:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And after all, they both seemed flat.
Yet one was calm and one had bears
Who wanted to devour me there
And wear my remains as a hat. Of course, I speak in metaphor For hills and bears are not the same. Bears don’t exhaust you to the core And though with bears you may run more They eat you soon and spare you pain. I’d like to think that that was that Now I have time to tell this hence; Two roads diverged, and like a prat I took the one that wasn’t flat And that's made all the difference.

Right, I’m off to send £500 by online transfer, not sure why.

Hill Jogielka

Week 3 Run 2 – The One With No Bounce

I’ve been very fortunate so far during the runs, in that it hasn’t rained once yet. It was supposed to this morning and I was sort of looking forward to it a little bit, since I don’t know what running in the rain is like, but it might be fun.

Even I know that I’ll come back to that paragraph in a few weeks and realise what a fool I am.

The music on the podcast this week, as ever, is top quality. The last walk is done to a piece that reminded me of a barn dance in the Deep South (I’m talking in the USA, not Portsmouth), and the final run to music that I can only describe as “Madonna In Da Club”. I don’t know if they’re trying to disorientate you, but I felt neither like I was in Texas, nor in a city centre at 2 in the morning (although admittedly for the latter they’re both dark and make you feel a bit sick).

Some fantastic advice with Laura. She told me that the first run was for 90 seconds, then followed with “You managed 90 seconds last week. Well, this is the same”. (Oh, and this was after telling me that the program “Walk 90 seconds, run 90 seconds, walk 3 minutes, run 3 minutes” apparently “sounds complicated”. I disagree – complicated would be that whilst listening to and following the instructions of the Cha Cha Slide).

At one point (mid-run, no less) she told me to imagine that I was running beside a hedge and there was somebody the other side who could see my head bobbing up and down, and the idea was that they shouldn’t be able to tell if I was running or walking. Apparently “the point of this tip is to encourage you to be less… bouncy.” That’s a genuine quote. The NHS paid somebody to sit in a studio and tell potential runners to be less reminiscent of an inflatable. Even the way Laura says the word “bouncy” suggests that she realises how ridiculous she sounds).

To be fair, this isn’t a bad strategy, since once I’m told I need to bounce less, I do feel the urge to keep running, in the vain hope that I’ll go fast enough that my ears will fall out and I won’t ever have to hear such an inane statement again (although I’m sure it’s probably very helpful to anybody who’s accidentally gone out jogging on a pogo stick or a bouncy castle)

Slightly bizarre jabbering in my ear aside, this run wasn’t too bad. I managed to do what I like to think looks impressive by running past a man and disappearing into a side street, then further round on the loop meeting him again, fortunately in another running stint. So he may well have thought that I’d been running for the whole time, when actually I’d had a couple of sessions of walking in between! It’s the perfect crime! (So the Batman thing lasted precisely one run before I turned to a life of crime. Ah well).

I also saw a couple of people running in high-visibility jackets and got very jealous. They looked so professional and visible. I may need to look into this.

Marathom Cruise

Week 3 Run 1 – The One That Was Probably Not A Good Idea

This morning, I awoke to a beautiful scene of iced-over cars and 0 degree weather. (I know if anybody’s reading in Canada I’ve probably just described summer, but this is cold for us.) I’d decided the night before that if in the morning it was cold and icy that I wouldn’t run for safety reasons (remember the scene in Bambi where he goes on the ice for the first time? That’s me on normal surfaces – imagine what happens when I go on the ice! I’ve been ice-skating once in Germany, and genuinely within the first thirty seconds I’d fallen over three times and hurt my back so that I couldn’t lie down without it hurting for the next four days. It sounds silly but I wasn’t expecting the ice to be as slippery as it was).

The flaw in this plan is that all the windows in our flat face backwards, away from the road, so it’s impossible to tell what the road and pavement surfaces were like. To see this would involve leaving the flat, and naturally this is the sort of thing generally best done dressed in normal clothes. (Protip: wearing clothes is generally more socially acceptable than not doing so). And since if it was nice I would be going jogging, I decided to don my running attire to go and see what Jack Frost had done.

(I don’t think I’ve described my running outfit – it definitely needs a bit of a renovate since it consists entirely of the only clothes I have here that aren’t completely inappropriate for running. The main issue is that the outer layer when it’s cold is a black pair of tracksuit trousers and a navy blue raincoat, meaning that I’m almost entirely black when I step out into the dark mornings. It’s like being the Dark Knight, except instead of travelling by Batmobile I’m travelling by a light jog, meaning that I can’t protect Gotham’s streets, but maybe just one street. As long as it’s a fairly short street.)

Having stepped outside, I saw that everything was glistening with a lovely glow that suggested going back to bed. The issue was that I had now stepped outside, and it felt a bit like giving up to go back at that point. So, knowing even then that it was almost definitely a bad idea to go, I decided to go.

I was very careful this time. I remembered a part of the route that wasn’t too icy the last time I went out in cold weather and followed this round for a smallish loop back to my house, and just repeated this. I took everything very slowly as well, meaning that distance-wise this was probably my shortest run yet, around 2 miles total distance travelled.

All in all, I managed to keep my feet almost the whole way round – there was just one Bambi moment when I inadvertently crossed the road and went over a puddle that gave me flashbacks of Germany (the ice rink incident, not like a flashback of when I was in ‘Nam). But I stayed more or less upright and vowed to avoid it in future. (Protip: if you find yourself slipping on ice whilst out for exercise, why not consider going home and having a bath instead? Much warmer and slightly less dangerous).

I haven’t even mentioned the running yet. This week is two iterations of 90 seconds running followed by 90 seconds walking, followed by 3 minutes of running and 3 minutes of walking. And I’m astonished to say that the first three minute running session was actually not too bad. I completed it without counting down the seconds, and actually thought that I might be able to do the second lot of three minutes without feeling too bad as well.

Well, what do I know? I went running in the ice, for goodness sake! The second 3 minutes was definitely more of an endurance test – I guess it means I wasn’t really thinking about the 90 second one, which was the big fear last week, so maybe Laura’s tricking me into being fit. I still don’t really trust her. She said some ridiculous things and played some ridiculous music this week, but I should probably get ready for university now instead of typing.

I did have the fun experience at the end of the run of walking down a sidestreet which had one of those vents spewing steam out, meaning that I got to finish by appearing out of a cloud of smoke (I like to think).

I’m the relay runner that Gotham deserves, but not the one that it needs right now.

I am Baton-man.

(Aka Bruce Sprain)

Week 2 Run 3 - The One With The Betrayal

I made a big mistake today. I started to trust Laura.

She’d been so nice this week – telling me to breathe, telling me how to put my foot down on the ground (heel first, which makes sense; not the ball of your foot first, I understand why people would do that; or the side of your foot. What? Who would ever think that running on the side of your foot would be a good idea? People would think you were busting for the loo) and other such niceties. I thought we were getting along. I thought we might even be friends, and we could keep hanging out after the nine weeks are over – I could sit and eat some fruit, she could play me knock-off versions of famous bands and we could talk about breathing and how to blink (close your eyelids using your muscles, not a forklift truck).

But then she did this run to me! You turn your back on her for a second, and it turns out that she’s been taking stabbing classes.

It wasn’t as if it was a new podcast – it was exactly the same mix of running and walking as I’d done twice before this week with little to no difficulty. But by the time the third run came around this time, I was absolutely exhausted. I don’t think it helped that at the end of that run she told me that “You might be feeling tired.” You think?

And then the fifth run came around, and she attempted to reassure me with “You’re nearly done now!” Which was immediately followed by “Buuuuut… you’ve got another 90 second run now”.  Thanks, Laura. And before the sixth and final, the phrase “You’ve got just 90 seconds of running to go.” Just 90 seconds? That’s easy for you to say, Laura, you’re recording that in some cushy studio made of pineapples and oxygen. I’ve got to actually do it!

It probably doesn’t help that I always feel a bit awkward switching from walking to running and vice versa, as if somebody can only go outside and do one or the other. If people see me slow down from a run, I think that they think I’m lazy (accurate, mind you) and if people see me start to run, I think that they reckon I’ve just committed a crime and don’t want to be seen around any more. For some reason, before I start to run I find myself visibly checking my watch, as if to say “Ah yes, time to start running again. No murders or vandalism here”. This would probably be considerably less strange if I were actually wearing a watch and didn’t just regularly check my wrist instead.

The run felt fruitless, as was the end of the run since I didn’t have any fruit in the house. I guess it’s going to be a case of two steps forward, one step back (maybe this is the issue with my running style?) but the step back does feel like a bit of a shame. In week 3 there’s a bit of running for 3 minutes, and I have no idea how I’ll manage even that, let alone a 5k run – the couch is sounding more appealing now!

On my way back home I stepped in a puddle, and spent the final few minutes with cold feet. It seemed quite poetic.

Steven Not-Fit

(Long shot to keep the Sherlock theme going for the entire week).

Week 2 Run 2 – The One With The Potassium Rush

Morning came this morning, in case you were unaware, and here it was a lovely start – the ground was a bit soggy, but it wasn’t raining at all, about 9 degrees, pretty much perfect running weather as far as I’m concerned. (And believe me, when it comes to running I’m concerned quite a lot).

Today I planned my run beforehand, and then accidentally missed a turning and ended up doing a completely different one. That’s something you don’t see very often – somebody in a car might stop and ask for directions (unless they’re male, in which case we’ll drive confidently in any direction until we end up in the right place or run out of petrol, in which case we’ll sell the car and start a new life wherever we happen to have landed, to avoid embarrassment. I once managed to get in the wrong lane when very nearly home and it took me another twenty minutes to get back because I didn’t want to admit I’d gone wrong and turn around). Occasionally you’ll get somebody who’s walking ask you where some important thing is (I seem to get this quite a bit, I must look like I know where I’m going. They evidently didn’t read the previous bracket) but you never see somebody stop from a jog to ask how to get somewhere. So I found a different route instead.

Laura seems to be giving me a bit of a respite at the moment, the running itself hasn’t been too painful. The disadvantage of using the same podcasts, though, is that advice that was at least vaguely interesting the first time feels more and more patronising the more you hear it. Admittedly hearing the breathing advice a second time, I understood a bit more what she meant, and I tried it. I think the following haiku sums up my experience:

One, two, three, four, breath;

One, two, three, four, breath; one, breath…;

Oh, I’ve done it wrong.

It’s disappointing when you can’t even breathe properly.

Fortunately, I did manage to make it back despite the bad directions and the inability to respire as Laura wants me to. Whilst stretching, I thought what a strange idea that was. Who sat down and thought “When I do exercise, my legs start hurting a bit later. The obvious solution to this is as soon as I finish exercise to contort myself, so my legs hurt then instead. That will solve the problem.”? I bet they were as surprised as anybody when it turned out to actually be the sensible thing to do.

I don’t really know what I’m saying. I had the recommended banana and water after the run so I think I’m coming off a potassium rush.

Una Stubbed-Toe

(I seem to be going Sherlock-themed this week, but this is the last name I have. Given how I felt last week, perhaps Rupert Grave would have been a suitable third).

Week 2 Run 1 – The One Where I Breathed

Another week (the second week), another podcast (the second podcast). It was quite exciting to listen to something different this time, and to have Laura congratulate me on finishing the first week. Apparently I’ve got over the first hurdle. Seemingly she’s made the next hurdle out of razor wire and bloodhounds just to keep me on what’s left of my toes.

Actually it wasn’t too horrendous this time. 90 seconds of running followed by 2 minutes of walking was the order of the day, so I think it was probably only 9 minutes of running in total; one more than last week, but not so much as to kill me. Although come to think of it, the last minute or so was the most painful. That wily Laura, just getting me enough fitness to keep killing me every week, whilst gradually working me up to running longer and longer distances. She’s either a great personal trainer or the main antagonist from Saw.

My favourite part of this podcast was when she told me how to breathe. Genuinely. It wasn’t very helpful, though, because I think my run-addled brain didn’t understand what she was saying. From what I understand when my foot hits the floor, I count to four and breathe in, then count to four and breathe out. Trouble is, I don’t know whether it’s supposed to be four steps, or four steps with a particular foot (eight in total, I have two feet whilst Laura lets me), or four beats of the music (which always seems to go too fast to run in time to unless I was a hyperactive gerbil). In the end I counted steps; sometimes four, sometimes eight, five worked for a while. Basically, I breathed when I needed air, a system which has never failed me thus far.

No Fake That this week, although the last track for running was definitely Fake Paramore. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Paramore song, but I know enough to know that that wasn’t them. The song that they give you to listen to you on the warm-down walk included the lyric “Go the extra mile”, which I thought was very unfair and made me want to track down the lead singer and punch him in the face; lovingly of course. As proof that the song has incredibly mixed messages, the bridge included the line “I will take you there, let me take you there”. This made me want to track down the lead singer and take him up on the offer in future.

At the end, Laura told me I did well (although I think she says that to everybody) and that I could reward myself with some water and a piece of fruit for the energy. Well, stuff that, Laura – until you come up with a Couch to 5kJ eating plan, I’m having a brioche. So there.

Benedict Stumblebatch

Week 1 Run 3 – The One Where Environmental Difficulty Level Was Set To “Medium”

I was prepared last night looking at the weather for it to be a balmy 3 degrees this morning. What I forgot about, I was promptly reminded of upon stepping outside and seeing the pavements glisten like icy pavements on a Friday morning. But hey, it’s running, and it’s icy. What could possibly go wrong, I thought?

I’ll give you a minute to decide.

…

You know, I’m as surprised as you, but actually that didn’t happen! I managed to stay upright for the entire session (apart from the stretch at the end where you put your knees behind your head and your head behind your lower intestine and eat your feet or something like that). There was the occasional bit of road running (with no Wile E Coyote for company, just the occasional dog walker or jogger. I considered writing fellow jogger there, but I think it’s too soon) or grass running (did that make me Blade Runner?) but other than that, all perfectly safe and healthy and alive.

This was the first time I’d vaguely planned a route ahead of time instead of just picking the road that looked the easiest at each point, and I didn’t even get lost!

I did have one slightly awkward moment just before run 5, where I came onto a road and there was a man walking about 100m ahead of me, with the run about to start. I could see how it was going to go – I was going to start jogging in the same direction (no changing routes, this was one long road with only dead ends for turnings), go past him and almost immediately, the minute would be up and I’d start walking again. It would just look like I was really keen to be slightly in front of him in my morning walk.

Sadly I could think of no way to counter this other than going past him on the other side of the road (like the Good Samaritan without the injury), jog for a little longer than Laura told me to avoid being socially awkward, and then slow down when I didn’t think he would notice.

Just before I started the next run, I looked behind me. He was there. He’d noticed. So I ran away. That’s the advantage of going out running, you can lose people.

I also had the beautiful experience at the fourth run of thinking “Hey, I’m doing OK at the moment. Maybe my fitness really is improving!” It’s this level of arrogance for which they invented run number six, at which point I was dying again and Laura had the upper hand. Although I suspect she doesn’t have hands, just talons to claw at the last pockets of oxygen in my lungs.

I hope Fake That come back in future podcasts, I have one of the songs from the run stuck in my head. It’s definitely not based on the Take That song “Greatest Day”, because that one goes “Today this could be the greatest day of our life” and Fake That’s one goes “This is the greatest day” so they are clearly very different songs. Also Take That never got a gig on an NHS podcast, so there’s that.

Next week we start the next regiment of running. I’m off to lock all the doors so Laura can’t find me.

Gym Carrey

Week 1 Run 2 - The One That Was Unexpectedly Uphill A Bit

I approached this run with a degree of hesitation. My legs were still a little bit sore from Monday’s run (apparently I didn’t stretch enough – more on that in a minute) and I was also feeling a bit ill. Nonetheless, I got out of bed, decided I didn’t feel too awful, and went for it once again.

I’ve changed my mind about Laura a little bit, I don’t think she’s trying to murder me as well. In the words of Dobby, she isn’t trying to kill me, only maim or seriously injure. As part of today’s run (the same schedule as the first one), I inadvertently took a route that meant the second run was uphill. Not substantially uphill, you should note, just a gradual incline, but in my current state of fitness a light breeze is cause for concern. I managed to get up to seven runs out of eight without being exhausted, it was only the last one that required quite a push, but I was not best pleased with Laura and what she was saying in my ear. The most inane comment being “You need to do this run three times before moving on. So if this is your first time doing this, you need to do it two more times.”

You don’t say, Laura?

Anyway, I arrived back home pretty much exactly at the end of the podcast, which, given I got quite lost the last time I tried to come home, I decided to count as a win. All that was left to do were the stretches.

Oh dear goodness, the stretches. I remembered about three from my school days, and the muscles I missed were the ones that had been aching. I suspect that the reason they didn’t talk about stretching them at school is because in order to get into the positions required you essentially have to be Elastigirl from the Incredibles. The first one involved lying on my back, knees up to my check and then putting one ankle on top of the other knee. I don’t work like that! I did my best, all the time feeling like if somebody walked in, they would see what looked like a man made out of rubber having a slow motion fight with an invisible leopard.

Fight over, I was feeling OK – maybe running isn’t all bad for you. I’d decided to take the day at home to work, and subsequently did what all good working-from-home people do and went back to bed. Hopefully illness won’t curtail the progress I’m making – already I want to kill disembodied voices coming from my iPod a bit less, and I know what to do if I ever get lynched by an elderly Simba.

I have no idea how I’m ever going to run for longer than a minute at a time, though.

Runny Zellwegger

Week 1 Run 1 - The First One

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Lots of people talk about how amazing they feel after going for a run, I presumed it would be the same for me first time out. All I can say is that those people must have this mysterious thing called “fitness”. I lack this somewhat. I think in the final few minutes “I am literally dying” came into my head, and the phrase “final few minutes” may have been referring to time on this Earth as well as time out on the run.

I’m using the NHS Couch to 5k plan, which takes you from doing no exercise to running a stupid distance in just 9 weeks. Lots of people have been singing the praises of the programme, and the podcasts that come with it, that combine tracks by bands that aren’t Take That but want to be, with the soothing tones of Laura.

Now, I don’t know what I did to Laura, but she remembers it and she wants to make me suffer. She sounds all sweetness and light in my ears but she made me run, and I’m not very good at running. Or exercise. Or movement. When the program said Couch to 5k, I was hoping that somebody was going to come and pick me up from my couch and carry me 5k. Apparently you’re supposed to do it yourself.

I started off well. The alarm went off at 6.30, and I got up. I feel like this part is important, because it shows some degree of competency as a human being. This feeling will not last.

It starts with a 5 minute brisk walk, which I quite enjoyed. If only all running could be walking. But no, Laura decided that I should then run for a minute, and when Laura tells you to do something in your ear, you do it. You don’t want to let her down, and she doesn’t want you to be able to breathe. So I ran for a minute, then she gives you 90 seconds to walk. It sounded so easy on paper, and it would definitely be straightforward to anybody who had done any exercise since August. The first lot was fine, but then she makes you do it seven more times. That’s eight minutes of running! Roger Bannister could have gone two miles in that time! At the end I was happy to still be on my feet, although my feet seemed less happy about the arrangement.

It didn’t help that I don’t know the back roads of Kenilworth too well, so I managed to get a bit lost on the way back and it meant my five minute warm down turned into a fifteen minute wander down a road I desperately hoped took me home.

I got back in and spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes sitting down, drinking water, eating raisins (the only healthy thing I could find in the house; I figured following what could only loosely be described as a “run” by eating three chocolate bars was probably counterproductive) and deciding that exercise is bad for you. If it’s supposed to make you healthy, why did I feel like it had killed me?

I get to do this twice more this week before moving on to more running next week. Laura’s coming for me, and she hates my muscles. (Although let’s be honest, it’s probably more like muscle).

If I don’t survive the next one, I want it known that I didn’t die doing what I love. And Laura will pay.

Rupert Sprint

Introduction

Allow me to introduce myself. I am perennially unfit. I get out of breath running a bath.

But, despite being almost impressively out of shape most of my life, I never really had an aversion to PE at school - in fact, I rather enjoyed it at times. Running, however, was not one of those times. I remember in the summer our warm up would be a lap of the 400m running track. Now, that for me is not a warm up, that is a microwaving. And running in any other shape or form never really did it for me either. And so after school, with the exception of a bit of tennis in the summer, I decided against any form of exercise.

In the past couple of years, though, I've always had in the back of my head that it would be quite nice to do a bit of running every now and again. My preferred hierarchy of running places is Treadmill > Jogging > Gym, due almost exclusively to the number of people at each stage who can point and laugh while I desperately try to get into shape.

A treadmill is somewhat infeasible in a first floor flat, especially since I harbour a fear that running on a treadmill with people living below will result in either them coming to me and introducing themselves with baseball bats for the constant thudding on their ceiling, or their ceiling may decide it is not a fan of my running style and I may get suddenly and vertically acquainted with them instead. So treadmill is out, and so the next option is jogging.

As such, for 2014 I have decided that, three times a week, I will set my alarm for 6:30 and go jogging where hopefully nobody will be able to see me (because of the time of day, certainly not because of the blistering pace I'll be keeping up).

For the first nine weeks I'll be using the NHS' "Couch to 5K running plan", available from http://www.nhs.uk/Tools/Pages/couch-5K-running-plan.aspx. I don't actually spend too much time on the couch at the moment, so was hoping the first couple of weeks would be practice at ordering takeaway and watching TV, but alas, they seem more keen on the moving about outside part. Still, it'll be interesting to see if I, somebody who may well have an allergy to exercise, can actually get up to running a reasonable length of time. If I can do it, anybody can. And if I can't do it, still anybody probably can but you'll know I don't count as a person.

We'll see how I go. It could be a fun journey. It won't be, but it could be.

Theo Walkott

(I have a lot of time whilst running, I don't have much better to do than come up with exercise-pun-based names).