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