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.