Week 9 Run 3 – The One Where I Ran 5km

 Time for another spoiler alert: if you don’t want to know whether or not I ran 5km, quickly invent a time machine, go back to about ten seconds before now and smash your laptop before you get a chance to read the title. Also, don’t read the next paragraph because I’m going to tell you there that I did run 5km this morning. Oops.

But yes, I finally managed to travel 5km using only my legs and without vehicular assistance, for the first time in my life!

To celebrate this occasion, allow me to give you some fun facts about 5 kilometres:

·        It’s far.

·        Really far.

Well, that’s it for fun facts about 5 kilometres.

Today’s run was quite exciting, if nothing else because everything was shrouded in fog which made it feel a little bit like I was jogging through a horror film. Maybe Romero’s “28 Minutes Later” would have been fitting; a fairly short film describing how one man jogged through the zombie apocalypse in a place where there weren’t any zombies, thus it looked just like somebody running through fog. I think that’s a great idea for making any film into a zombie film – just pretend that it’s happening elsewhere in the world and it just so happens that everybody we’re seeing in the film is immune or something. And then when the camera stops rolling you assume that’s because everybody’s been eaten by zombies. Depending on the film (I’m looking at you, Aeon Flux!) this could be somewhat of a relief.

As I mentioned in my last post, I did this route on Wednesday to try and pace it out, and as I was running it again today I realised that I’d remembered more than I thought I had about where I was at various times. I know I started faster yesterday because 5 minutes in I was about 50m further back than I had been then. I didn’t let this dishearten me, though, because I knew that I’d worn myself out quite a bit on Wednesday, so as long as I didn’t wear myself doing something stupid like trying to run 5km, I should be OK.

Somebody asked me once what I think about when I’m running. I considered this question a bit as I was running, and it turns out that either I can’t remember what I’m thinking about because I’m not paying attention to that, or I’m paying attention to what I’m thinking and I’m thinking about wondering what I’m thinking about. So hopefully that answers that.

At the 10 minute mark, I reckon I must have been in pretty much the same place, and I don’t remember where I was at the 15 minute mark on Wednesday so that wasn’t much use for measuring. I do remember today being very tired coming up to 20 minutes in, which I realised when I started crossing a road and wasn’t really sure if I was moving or not. I didn’t really seem to know what to do with legs, which is odd because I’ve had legs for as long as I can remember and don’t generally have issues with knowing what to do with them.

The final ten minutes, I felt I was going stronger than I had been on Wednesday, which was a good sign. I even managed to overtake the same people that I overtook on Wednesday, in roughly the same place, as an omen to keep going.

My optimistic target coming in to today’s run was to finish in under 30 minutes, but that seemed very unlikely right up until the final 5 minutes, when suddenly it seemed possible for a brief moment. It’s amazing what oxygen deprivation can do to you; I couldn’t quite finish in that time, ending up with a final time of 31:05. It’s practically glacial, but I finished. I’m counting that as a win.

Alas, this brings me to the end of my journey with Laura. At the end, she still resolutely refused to suggest recommending this to a friend, instead opting for “anyone else you know who wants to make the same progress you have”, which is a bit different. She also casually suggested that in future I could either run with my own music or relisten to old podcasts – she’s not prepared to let go yet!

Unfortunately for her, I think I am ready to let her go – after all, I can’t hold her back any more, I’ll just have to turn away and slam the door. Hey, that would make a good song!

With thanks to James Blunt (possibly the world’s least common start to a sentence), here is my departing thought to Laura:

Will I disappoint you

If now I say

I don’t want to listen

To a fake Coldplay

For ten weeks we ran

Through thick and thin

Though I put most of the effort in.

But now we’re over

And I will stop there

Oh, I’ll still be running

But you’ll be elsewhere

You shared my tears, you shared my smiles.

You made me run three point one miles.

You criticised my running style

I’ve been offended by you

I have felt joy, I have felt pain

You’ve driven me slightly insane

And now you’re gone, I have moved on

I have to say this to you:

Goodbye, my Laura

You’re not my friend

But you made me run

And you made me run for free

Goodbye, my Laura

This is the end

I’d say it’s been fun

But I don’t lie easily

In all seriousness, though, despite my constant complaining about Laura, she has managed to get me from a couch to running 5km in ten weeks (with a break in the middle) which is quite impressive. So if you decide that you fancy trying the same thing, you can do a lot worse than her. (And if you do, let me know if she mentions me).

Thanks is also due to anybody who’s read this blog over the past ten weeks. It makes it a bit easier to get motivation to run if you’ve got to write about it afterwards, and it makes it easier to write about it if you know that there are people who will read it.

So where now? I haven’t completely decided yet, I have a few ideas floating around for what to set as my next target, and I also don’t know whether I’ll write about the next one yet, so I don’t want to commit to anything yet; but I’ll post on here if I decide to keep going. I feel like I should leave you with a deep, insightful comment to cap off the couch-to-5k plan, so here it is:

5 kilometres is a long way!

Des Finish Line-am

Week 9 Run 2 – The One Where I Overtook

Let’s start with the headline news: I ran 2.9 miles this morning. Second story: I was overtaken by a very enthusiastic runner. Third story: I sort of overtook a runner back, except I didn’t. Weather: Foggy with a chance of overexposition. Full story below.

Ah look, we’re below. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. But I’ll scowl at you a bit, because I’d quite like to have been sitting comfortably this morning rather than running. It took almost ten minutes to get out of the house this morning, which, bearing in mind literally all I need to do is get up and put on running gear, is impressively slow. Being impressively slow is not typically a good omen when it comes to preparing for a run.

I have a tactic for this run and Friday’s run, which is to run the same route both times. My main issue is that I generally don’t know how far I’ve been running, and thus I don’t know if I’ve hit 5km, so I’ve rectified it by doing the route for the first time today, checking how far I’ve actually run, working out how far I would need to go to finish off (in this case, about another 300m) and do that on the Friday. You might say “Surely you could measure out the route beforehand”, to which I would reply “Possibly, but the warm-up walk throws the distance out of whack because I don’t know how far I cover in that time.” To which you might say “But you could measure how far you cover in 5 minutes the last time out”, to which I say “Woah, mister! Who do you think I am, Measuring Man?” To which you might say “Excellent point, well made, I retract all of my earlier claims. Here’s £20”. To which I say “Thanks,” because I’m as good at being thankful as I am bad at measuring things.

The less facetious advantage to pacing it out in advance is also that I get some idea of landmarks. I get told every five minutes what the time is, and if I can remember where I was at those timestamps the last run out, I know how close I am to doing the pace I need to be doing to get through 5km in 30 minutes. Sadly I was about as good at remembering to think about this as I am good at measuring things, and thus this best laid scheme of mice and men gang aft agley. In other words I have no idea where I was at any point along the run.

I have, however, established how far I would need to run, and with a warm-up walk like I had this morning the end point is actually my house, which is quite nice. Thus on Friday, my aim will be to run the full 5k, even if the podcast runs out by the time I get there (which, given current evidence, is likely).

Today was a slower run; I managed to get a stitch somewhere ridiculously early (between the 5 and 10 minute mark) which meant I had to focus on my breathing for a while. I also started too fast, as I am prone to doing, and thus was once again worn out by the 20 minute mark, although less so than I have been in the past. I think I’m still not a big fan of running.

As I was merrily jogging along with my stitch I had an experience which bizarrely I’ve managed to stave off for the past 9 weeks.

I was overtaken by another jogger.

And when I say overtaken, I mean properly overtaken. It wasn’t one of these long, drawn-out affairs where they gradually draw level, slowly pull away and eventually after a long battle of wills you let them slowly drift away into the sunrise. No, she was straight past me as if I wasn’t moving. My first thought was disappointment; my second was revenge. I was going to up my speed and catch this person back up!

That thought probably lasted in the region of three seconds before I realised she was much fitter than I was, going much faster than I was, and generally was not going to be visible for much longer. Indeed we turned a corner onto a road that wasn’t too long, and by the time I was halfway down it she’d already disappeared round the next bend.

So my first target to overtake somebody had failed. But I’m nothing if not determined, and therefore I’m probably nothing. But nonetheless I decided that I wasn’t going to take this lying down, and instead I would continue running – or rather “running” as I may have to now refer to it as having seen how much slower I do it than most people.

But my chance for revenge came a short while later. I was running down a road, when across the T-junction at the end, I saw a streak of blue. Another jogger! (Fortunately not the same one lapping me; that would have been disappointing but not surprising). And not too far ahead! Perhaps I could catch this guy and redeem myself!

I turned onto the road and he was already quite a way ahead, so I quickly abandoned this plan, and replaced it with a plan to continue running and not collapse, which was one I executed slightly more successfully. (Balance was not my strong point during the run today; during the warm-down walk I nearly fell off a kerb and during the run itself I had to do evasive manoeuvres to avoid a bush which leaped out at me).

And yet, a few minutes down the road, I saw in the middle distance a blue figure, walking. Could it be? Could he have worn himself out and be doing a recovery walk? Could I overtake him and thus take the crown of Fastest Runner Out Of The Two Of Us At That Particular Point?

Now, there are some small potential questions to be raised at this point as to whether this was the same person. On the one hand, they were both wearing blue, which is a fairly strong argument. On the other hand, the jogging guy was a man and the person walking was an older woman who I think had a dog. So the evidence is fairly inconclusive either way. However, I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say that it was the same person, and I managed to overtake them whilst they were walking talking to their friend who also hadn’t been there before!

To celebrate this win, I ran for the remaining five minutes or so, stopped to try and appease my lungs who were threatening to go on strike and take my legs, and came back home for a well-deserved glass of water.

After all, it’s not every day you overtake another jogger!

Victory Pendleton

Week 9 Run 1 – The One Where I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

The final week began in a haze of tiredness. I was away in London over the weekend, which I very much enjoyed but meant that I didn’t get much good sleep on Saturday night. I didn’t quite manage to get to bed early enough on Sunday to compensate, so the alarm going off at 6:30 in the morning was about as welcome as… well, an alarm going off at 6:30 in the morning. So it took a few minutes for me to get ready.

What spurred me on through the hardest part of the morning other than the next 30 minutes and possibly everything after that as well, was the fact that it was a very nice morning. Not cold, clear skies, light – perfect weather for driving 5km which would have been by far the best choice of transportation rather than what I ended up going for.

Part of the issue with my weekend in London was that there was a reasonable amount of walking around; normally this would be fine, but I think it meant that my legs didn’t have time to recover from not running on Friday and decided to be extra painful this morning to make up for it.

As this is the final week, the runs today are what everything has been building up to – a straight 30 minute run, designed to take me around 5km. (Spoiler alert: today it didn’t take me that far). Furthermore, it’s the beginning of the end in my journey with Laura, the voice from the podcasts I’ve been following. This could be an unpleasant divorce.

For the run today I decided to go for the 5k route I’d planned out a couple of weeks earlier, on the route with lots of hills that almost killed me the last time I tried it. I wanted to see if it was any better backwards, and in some sense it was, but only in the sense that it extended the agony in one long slog rather than destroying me quickly in one steep hill.

You see, in this route there are a lot of slow hills that ascend/descend (depending on which direction you’re travelling, they don’t change themselves like some geographical equivalent of a train changing rails. Although that would be cool. Maybe if you were standing on one when it changed and it changed quick enough it would briefly feel like being on a bouncy castle. Although depending on how quickly it changed it would feel for a rather extended period of time like you’d broken your legs. I’ve lost my train of thought – it seemed to have derailed amongst the analogy. Let’s end this bracket, take a quick break and have another go at that sentence).

You see, in this route there are a lot of slow hills that ascend (or descend, depending on… wait a second, I think I’ve fallen into a similar trap before. It’s like Indiana Jones going into another temple a bit later on, seeing a massive boulder sitting just above the treasure he wants to steal. In that situation, he would be like “Yeah, boulder, I know what’s about to go down here. And guess what, Rocky? I brought my running shoes this week – and I’ve been doing the Couch to 5k plan so we could run for a little over 3 miles provided you were prepared to slow for hills. Which you probably are, because, you know, gravity.” Except that I’ve distracted myself again, so it would be like Indy sitting there thinking that, whilst Shia LaBeouf steals the treasure [and passes it off as his own] and runs away, and then Harrison Ford gets crushed by a large boulder, which fortunately is made out of polystyrene so it’s OK, but it’s still a bit of a bother for all involved. Where was I? Ah yes).

You see, in this route there are a lot of slow hills (do I mean slow hills? I’m meaning a hill which is fairly shallow, and Google doesn’t seem to recognise slow hill as a term. Maybe I should go for shallow hill instead, that probably means what I think it does. Although that then makes it a bit more reminiscent of water rather than a hill, which is not very helpful because the hills I’m referring to are quite dry. They do go near a river at one point, though. Oh look, it’s Shia LaBeouf again! Oh look, it’s a boulder! Ow.)

You see, in this route there are a lot of shallow hills (better), which if you’re running down them are fairly pleasant, and if you’re running up them they gradually wear you down like a boulder in Indiana Jones. There are also some steeper ones, which are fine to run down for a while, but nasty to run up. The direction I went last time, there’s a steep hill towards the end of the hilly part, followed by a gentle downhill part thereafter – having destroyed myself on the hill, I didn’t appreciate the nice downhill afterwards. Going the other way means that the nastiest hilly bit comes about halfway through, and I was expecting it and duly slowed down. (If anybody’s getting the audiobook version of this, that’s duly with a ‘d’. I don’t need to go introducing somebody called Julie to overcomplicate matters further with Laura.) (Audiobook goes on sale Monday, £25 from all good retailers which sell it)

The reverse route turned out to not really be much more pleasant than doing it forwards; although I had more energy when I was done with the hilly part this time round than was the case last time, I was still exhausted by the 20 minute mark, which meant I had to push through 10 more minutes of misery.

Still, I managed to do it, and even managed to avoid collapsing at the end (about the 25 minute mark I was starting to feel physically sick and thought I might have to have a brief nap on the pavement). I pushed through to the very last second when Laura told me I could stop.

30 minutes of running, and how did I feel? Elated? Delighted? Enthusiastic? You bet I didn’t! I felt like I’d just run for 30 minutes and wanted to have a nice sit down and remove all my aching limbs, leaving me with just a floating head.

But I realised something as I did my “brisk” warm-down walk (it hasn’t been brisk for weeks. It’s barely been motion). Throughout the past 9 weeks, I’ve managed to get through with an attitude every week that “What I’m doing now is the very limit of what I’ll ever be able to achieve”. I remember writing in my blog in the first week how I didn’t think I’d ever be able to run for more than a minute at a time, and typically most weeks I’d look at what was coming up next and think “I couldn’t possibly do that”. And somehow, despite every week feeling exhausted and like I was never going to get anywhere, I’ve managed to go over the course of this term from no exercise at all to being able to run 4.6km in 30 minutes. It’s a massively slow time of course, but I’m pleased with that for somebody who was completely averse to physical exercise before January. And despite feeling that 5km is about as far as I could ever run, there’s now something inside me that reckons I might be able to go further. The rest of me wants to find a surgeon to perform a motivationoscopy to get rid of that thing, though.

When I came back I spent a good few minutes just lying down on the bathroom floor, lacking the energy to get up. I didn’t want this post to end on too optimistic a note.

Barbara Strides-and.

Week 8 Run 3 – The One With The Headache

A short update this morning, essentially because this only counts as a run in the very loosest sense of the word. I woke up this morning with a nasty headache – it was a nice day, so I thought I’d go outside and hope that the fresh air would help it to ease a bit. Unfortunately when I went out I could pretty much feel it thumping through my head every time I took a step – and for those who are uninitiated in the way of running, there are quite a few steps involved in it.

I’d planned out my route, but very quickly I decided to readjust it for a shorter one that took me back past my house, in the vein of Monday’s run. This time, though, I couldn’t even bring myself to do that, and I stopped at about the twelve minute mark and walked back.

I was slightly disappointed to have the first morning where I didn’t complete the allotted run, but at least this wasn’t to do with being out of breath or unfit. (Although I don’t think I was particularly well this morning; I had a stitch-like pain in my side from the warm-up walk which was my first sign that things probably weren’t going well).

Having gone back home and had some paracetamol and lots of water, I’m feeling a bit better now, so hopefully it was just a short-term thing. Over the past two weeks I have now done the week 8 podcast three times, so I feel qualified to move on to the final set of podcasts next week – and the last three blog posts.

This time next week, I might be free from Laura forever!

Ache-illes

Week 8 Run 2 – The One With The Misplaced Thumbs

Yesterday was the beginning of an era. It’s a day that future historians will call “The Day I Got My First Pair Of Proper Running Shoes. And Some Running Socks”. For those of you who are confused by the name, yesterday was the day I got my first pair of proper running shoes.

And some running socks.

I went into Warwick and was very well looked after at Warwick Sports Shop (happy to give them a free plug, in exchange I’m more than happy to get some free stuff from them, just putting that on record). They analysed my gait, and apparently I have very flat feet. This would explain some of the difficulties I’ve been having in running – you try running in flippers and get back to me. I was then brought shoe after shoe after shoe to try (typically these came in pairs to make it easier) to see which felt the most comfortable. Given that the shoes I was comparing them with were the ones which have been systematically destroying my feet recently, anything was an improvement, but I picked a pair I liked.

I also picked up some running socks. I was slightly confused about what difference a sock makes to running but decided not to question it, especially when I was offered a three pack of socks which contained “a pair of socks worth £8, a pair of socks worth £11 and a pair of socks worth £13” (or some sorts of numbers). I had two questions I was too embarrassed to ask at that point:

1)      Who would pay £6.50 for a sock?

2)      What made the three socks have such different values? They all looked the same to me.

This seemed like too much stress for me; when I’m getting ready to run, how would I decide which one to wear? Do I need to decide in advance whether the day feels like an £8 day or a £13 day? Too much stress. I went for two packs of standard running socks, which all looked the same and cost the same which made me feel slightly more relaxed about paying £5 for a pair of socks. I’ve had cheaper restaurant meals.

Overall, I was happy, though –the shoes were cheaper than I was expecting to pay, and overall they seemed to be a good purchase. The only disappointment was that, despite being running shoes, they don’t actually run themselves. You need to run whilst wearing them, which is a shame. It’d be a lot easier if they just went themselves, like a hoverboard.

Anyway, I went out for a run this morning in my new shoes. And running socks. I would love to say that they made a dramatic distance and I can now run 5km in under a minute backwards whilst writing a Tony-award-winning play and solving world hunger. Sadly the play I wrote is off-Broadway at best and I’m only 80% of the way there with world hunger, so somewhat of a disappointment by comparison. The run was slightly more comfortable than before, though, so evidently the shoes must have been doing something. And the socks.

I managed to get through the full 28 minutes without getting too tired or slowing too much at one go, which meant by my estimates that I went 2.7 miles in that time. That did include an actual honest-to-goodness near sprint in the final minute when I realised I still had a little bit of energy left, but it makes me optimistic that maybe I could reach 5km in 30 minutes.

My main issue since I’ve restarted running is what to do with my thumbs, which sounds like a weird issue (mostly because it is). I can’t really remember what I did with my hands before my brief break from running – I’m fairly sure I tend to run with slightly clenched fists, because that seems to be the most comfortable and it also means I’m ready to launch a punch if I’m lynched by ninjas at any point. But the past couple of runs I’ve been clutching my thumb within this grasp, which has made them feel a bit sore at about the halfway point. They don’t feel so natural when outside the grasp of the other fingers, though – it feels a bit like I’m running with thumbs up like an energetic version of the Fonz.

This seems to coincide with the times I’ve been running without my glasses – maybe unbeknownst to me I’ve been keeping my thumbs in the frame of my glasses and I’m only just realising this. Further experimentation is needed, I think.

Shoey Lewis

Week 8 Run 1 revisited – The One With The Field Trip

Guess who’s back? Back again? To those of you who are expecting Slim Shady at the moment I’m probably going to be somewhat of a disappointment by comparison, but it’s actually me.

A week’s break has hopefully done me the world of good (it’s odd that I feel a lot better after a week of no exercise than I did after many weeks of exercise – support for my hypothesis that exercise doesn’t do you any good). My legs hurt a lot less than they did, I can walk on my foot again, and hopefully at some point this week I’ll get some new running shoes that don’t have a personal vendetta against my feet, which will hopefully spur me on to bigger and better things! (I’m thinking rollerskates might not be a bad idea)

Still, when 6:30 came around this morning, it was still a bit of a challenge to get out of my airbed (new mattress comes on Wednesday, this might be the most excited I’ve ever been about furniture), dig out the old running gear and go on the old jog-raphy field trip.

I optimistically set out on the same schedule as I had been on last week – a 28 minute run without stopping. I had no idea how fit I would be after a week off, since the last time I took a break from exercise it lasted around half a decade, but I thought I’d dive in at the deep end, because what’s the worst that could happen? Well, in the analogy, probably death by drowning or by being eaten by sharks, so maybe we should avoid allegories in this case.

It’s amazing how at this time of year, even a week makes a huge amount of difference to the light level, it was pretty much full daylight when I left the house. At least, I’m fairly sure that’s what it was, but everything was very foggy. I’d also decided that in an effort to reduce weight as much as possible and make my run easier, I’d go out without my glasses, so things were naturally slightly blurry anyway. The whole thing ended up with the impression of me running through a video game from the late 90s, a very Silent Hill vibe going on.

The pace was OK, and for the first half I wasn’t feeling too bad at all. However about halfway round I started to get quite tired, and with it I lost a bit of confidence in my planned route. It would have worked but would have committed me to running the full time and I didn’t know yet if I’d be able to do this – I didn’t want to be found on the pavement later half-eaten by a shark. So I decided to adapt like a universal adaptor, and take an alternative route that was shorter and would take me past my house at about the 20 minute mark, and I could decide then if I wanted to finish the run or not.

Unfortunately I got slightly confused about the route, missed the footpath I was aiming for and ended up in an alternative footpath that was going through a field. Although given the recent weather, field was an optimistic definition and it seemed a lot more like a mud factory.

The title of this blog is “the field trip”, and the punner within me would have been delighted if I’d fallen over at some point during this part of the run. The sensible tenth of me, though, didn’t want to make such sacrifices for comedy, and so the pace slowed quite substantially, to a walk in places, as I attempted to navigate, Bear Grylls-style, a field in rural Warwickshire. There were some worms and I wasn’t tempted to eat them, so I didn’t go full Grylls, but I did negotiate dangerous terrain (mud) and wildlife (there was somebody walking a dog I’d seen a couple of minutes earlier) in perilous conditions (light wind and only just above freezing) so I think that counts.

Having survived my harrowing ordeal (farming pun alert), I got back to the main business of the day, running. In a way, the field trip worked out quite well despite only being a minute or two, because it gave me a bit of time to catch my breath. Sadly a week away from sport meant my catching skills weren’t too good and it went away again shortly afterwards, but it was nice whilst it lasted.

I did summon up the willpower to pass my house and complete the full 28 minute run, although I was exhausted by the end. The air was so moist during the run that I could feel the water in my eyelids when I blinked towards the end, which kept me amused enough for the last couple of minutes to see me through to the end.

At the moment there’s very little in the way of leg pain (although that will come, it always does), and so hopefully I’ll be able to resume the final push towards the 5k target by the end of next week.

In other news, whilst driving in to university this morning I was temporarily stopped just before getting into the car park by two carefree ducks who wandered in front of my car and showed no signs of moving. I couldn’t quite find my horn to try and scare them off; fortunately some friendly passing builders came to my aid and shooed them off the road. Nothing to do with running but an interesting start to the day.

Alexander Pain (pun based on the Oscar-nominated director of Nebraska. I’ve never heard of him before but it requires minimal effort on my part and is vaguely topical).