I’m not sure if time is going backwards this week. I’ve
spent most of the week exhausted, but woke up this morning not feeling too bad,
and almost ready for the run. Given how the other two have felt, this feels
very much like a Monday morning in that respect. But hey, if time’s going
backwards that means I have two days off to look forward to! You don’t get that
on your average Friday!
So today Laura wanted me to run for 25 minutes without
stopping. Despite the relatively energy I was feeling, this didn’t seem like a
good idea. There’s running, which I’m now not completely averse to, and there’s
running for 25 minutes, which is starting to sound like something I should only
do every four years and get a medal for at the end. (Nobody practices for the
Olympics, right?)
On top of my base reluctance, which would be enough to
make a stampeding herd of buffalo decide that maybe ordering a pizza and
sitting down in front of the TV would be a better idea, I’ve also had
increasingly sore legs this week. It’s nothing particularly severe, but I’m
getting pains on the inside of my lower leg when I walk every now and again
fairly consistently throughout the week. I don’t think it’s getting worse, but
I don’t particularly want to aggravate them. (Incidentally, fun fact - the
second vowel in “aggravate” is an ‘a’. That was, like, my third guess). I’ve
had my legs for as long as I can remember, and if they end up resigning I don’t
know how to go about getting new applicants. There’s probably a pun conclusion
that I could come up with to that, but I can’t think of it. How disappointing.
This all combined led me to feeling quite concerned about
today’s voyage into the unknown. (Although by now I know the bits of Kenilworth
around me fairly well, but a “voyage to boldly go where I went last Wednesday”
doesn’t sound quite as dramatic). I decided that in order to have any chance of
getting through this at all, I would need to take it drearily, laboriously
slow. And that was exactly what I did.
It was not an exciting pace to begin with whatsoever. I
remember early on passing two snails, one of whom pointed at me (with one of
those big foam fingers that they have at ice hockey games in America; snails
don’t have hands) and said to the other one “You know what, fellow snail. That
guy’s running faster than we can travel, but still appreciably slower than lots
of other humans can run.” The fact that I was able to hear that entire sentence
gives some indication as to my speed, as anybody who has spent any time with
snails knows that they don’t speak very loudly. (Fun fact – if you put a snail
to your ear, you can hear the sea. You might need to remove the slimy bit
first, though).
So despite trudging along at a pace slower than a
unicycle with a puncture, I seemed to be going alright. I got the usual update
telling me I was 5 minutes in, which made me worry about how much further I had
to go. I ran for a bit longer, and then started to think that surely we were due
the 10 minute update soon. At which point Laura promptly appeared in my ears
and told me that we’d been going for 12½ minutes! I don’t think I believed her,
which may be why I started my post this morning talking about time travel. But I
was still alive at this point.
Indeed, a bit later when I got the 20 minute update, I
was still alive. This time last week, I was going through the five stages of
grief to Laura out loud; this week, I still had a bit of energy left. I hadn’t
gone quite as far in the 20 minutes as I had last time (I took a similar route
so I could compare) but I was feeling much better for it.
With a minute to go, Laura suggested that if I was
feeling OK, I could try picking up the pace for the final stretch to end on a
high. The first thought I had is probably unpublishable. The second was “Eh,
why not?” And through the rest of that minute I actually managed to
consistently accelerate to almost a sprint (by comparison). What if those
snails could see me now! (They couldn’t. Fun fact – the snails I talked about
earlier weren’t actually there).
So I did end on a high, not feeling too bad at all
despite having run for longer than I’ve ever run before. On the way back home
Laura told me nice things, which was appreciated – one of them being that I “am
officially a runner now”. I feel like I’ve graduated, and can now get a job
working as an Olympian or a green bean. If you see me in a mortar board and
pestle today you’ll understand why.
Alan Stitchmarsh
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