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).