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
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