The alarm went off this morning as per usual, and I
really didn’t want to get up and go for a run. Normally it takes until I start
running to feel like that, so maybe this is an improvement?
Anyway, I dutifully donned my Jacket of Bright Brightness
(+1 to health, -10 to stamina) and my Tracksuit Trousers (+5 to comfort, -5 to
coolness, -3 to formality) and went outside (-1 in temperature).
I still find the warm-up walk unpleasant on cold
mornings, I really just want to get running and get warm. The nice thing about
running is that when you get back (spoiler alert: I did get back this morning)
the weather doesn’t seem so cold, even once I’ve been inside, recovered and
left to go to uni.
Notice that in the above paragraph, I said “The nice
thing”. I’m not convinced there are any others.
For starters, my legs are starting to hurt a bit when I
begin to run, which is perhaps not a good thing, but it doesn’t seem to be
getting worse so I’ll file it under “Ignore until it either gets better or they
need to remove them” and get on with my life.
For a main course, I feel like today’s run was a step
back from Friday’s, and I still found it tricky. It was 5 minutes running, 3
walking, 8 running, 3 walking, 5 running; so 18 minutes in total running, more
than I’d done in all but one of the previous runs. (That last sentence has a
nice cadence. Hey, so does that one! That one didn’t.)
For dessert, I’ll have cheesecake. I always have
cheesecake for dessert.
But there’s no time for dessert when you’re running.
(More’s the pity, I think I’d be keener if there were). And despite my
three-course diatribe against running, I do feel like I’ve made a bit of
progress. This largely came in the second run, where I think I must have been
feeling the effects of oxygen deprivation because I told myself that I was
going to pick up the pace for that one. And so about four minutes in when I was
starting to tire and considering slowing down for a bit, I told myself not to
and kept the same pace. When Laura told me I only had a minute left to go, I
actually managed to pick it up further for the last little part, bounding along
like a wounded gazelle, or a speeding bullet just before it’s fired.
Of course, this wore me out and the last five minute jog
was done at the pace of a snail in treacle (no thank you, waiter, I ordered the
cheesecake) but I did manage to finish. I even gave a friendly nod to a man in
similarly bright garb jogging the other way. No more than that, though, because
he was jogging to the next set of bins he was emptying and I feel like he might
have thought I was mocking him had I said anything.
The final run wasn’t helped by Laura telling me that I
should find this last bit simple (it might have been had I not used all my
energy earlier), and following this with a song whose chorus was “So easy, so
easy” just repeated again and again. Fortunately the diction wasn’t perfect and
I could convince myself that he was actually saying “So wheezy, so wheezy”
which fitted better.
But I survived another run. When I came back, Laura told
me I should have plenty of water, so I took a shower. Seemed reasonable.
Runaldo. (My pun name stocks are running low)
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