Run 4 – The One In The Wild

Day 4, and I have been continuing my journey to infiltrate the species known as ‘Enthusiasticus Runna”, more commonly known as the morning jogger.

The joggers are known to operate at all times of day, but this particular species is known for its early rising. It often wears bright plumage at this time of year to stand out from the darkness, presumably to advertise its presence to nearby cars. Sometimes they can be found with earphones in; our working theory is that this reduces the number of operation senses, and thus reduces the chance that their body works out what they’re doing and tries to put a stop to it.

The main mode of transport of the species is a medium-pace run. On the cut-out-and-keep speed charts that come with the paper version of this blog, it lies somewhere between “Stationary” and “Light speed”, which will hopefully give you an idea of the speed of travel. Despite this very narrow band, there do appear to be various sub-classifications within this species, as they frequently vary in pace, as well as the distance travelled.

I have been attempting to blend in with these creatures. I possess my own brightly-coloured coat with which I hope to mimic their appearance, although the mornings have been too warm to use this thus far. With the oncoming darkness early on in the day, though, it may be worth wearing this soon lest I have an unfortunate incident with a carnivorous van in a dark street.

I have also invested in earphones, and a suitably-researched soundtrack. After spending a considerable amount of time deciding what the sounds of the wild are most likely to be, the designers evidently concluded that thudding basslines and electronic sounds were the ones most likely to blend into the background noise.

My audio guide Chad has been talking me through some of the rituals that they go through as they begin their activities. They seem to begin with a “Warm-up”, which is enthusiastically announced. This appears to resemble a walk, except that… no, actually, it really does seem to just be a 5 minute walk.

After this, my induction into jogging begins. At this stage I am still very low in rank and as such am unable to run for extended periods of time, no longer than a couple of minutes at a time. Some very highly trained individuals are able to run for upwards of 40 kilometres in a go, all whilst wearing the fluorescent car repellents. Although the feat is impressive, this does show that the species is somewhat uninquisitive – had these very able people investigated the cars more closely, they may have found a faster and less painful way to travel the same distance.

However, I believe the experiment is going successfully, and the group may be beginning to accept me as one of their own. This morning, in one of the fits of running between sessions of being exhausted, I saw one of the pack jogging the other way.

In such cases, there is an element of power play. When both joggers are running the same way, it becomes what is known as a “race”, whereby the person behind attempts to run fast enough to overtake the one in front, and the one in front has to stop this from happening. I am not certain, but I suspect that if an overtaking occurs, the loser has to give the winner their jacket, so you can tell who the most successful joggers are by how many coats they are wearing. I have yet to experience a jogger with more than one which makes me think that this place must be fairly far down on the foodchain.

I know of no such “race” equivalent for two joggers running towards one another. Generally this ritual seems to involve each jogger committing to a single side of the path and attempting to pass each other without falling off, rather like the ancient sport of jousting, except that lances appear to not be encouraged and horses are deemed to be cheating.

This process reaches its apex at the point of passing, whereby one jogger will utter a (usually relatively breathless) “Morning!” to the other. If there is sufficient respect between the two, the second will reciprocate. I attempted this ceremony this morning and achieved success, hearing a “Morning!” sent straight back to me. Even more impressively, this woman appeared to be much less tired than I was, meaning that I had the respect of somebody much higher up the food chain than I. Although I would have thought I might not actually be on the food chain as people probably don’t want to eat something bathed in sweat.

On the way back to the observatory, I encountered a more common “Canine Exercisium”, or dog walker. I attempted the same procedure but was not reciprocated. Presumably to gain the trust of this species I need to carry around a small hairy lick-y object of my own.

There is clearly much more research to be done here.

David Ate-a-bar-o’ Chocolate.

Run 3 – The One In Narnia

This morning was early.

I suspect the false start on Wednesday followed by running on Thursday and today has probably not helped my body’s perception of things; nor has its curious refusal to go to sleep before about 12.30am. Whatever the cause, when the alarm went off at 6:40 this morning I was none too pleased.

Actually, I started off being more confused than displeased. I’d been at church small group the previous night and I think my dream at that point involved me still being there, and I think I woke up halfway through making a point, to the point where I may have woken up talking. It took me a minute to work out what was happening, and from there it took me about a millisecond to decide that I wasn’t ecstatic about this. Whose stupid idea was it to have a blog about running? I definitely should have started a thrice-weekly blog about naps instead. I could have been the Napster and made sleep-based puns at the end. Maybe it’s not too late for this…

Alas, for now I am stuck with committing to actually get up and run in the mornings. So, with a fair deal of reluctance, I threw on some shoes, before realising that throwing shoes at yourself doesn’t actually help and instead putting them on my feet.

I also realised that I hadn’t downloaded the right podcast for today. There is a separate podcast for each run, which seems slightly odd given the minimal amount of input for each run. Chad, the friendly American voice who won’t use four words when one will do, and who won’t express any sentiment requiring more than ten, says exactly the same thing in each podcast, and I guess the only variation would be in the music that’s played.

The NHS podcasts I used last time often had relatively friendly tracks, stuff that wouldn’t be out of place in an alternative-universe Heart FM. These podcasts rely on high-tempo electronica, which is admittedly not too bad for running to. As an indication of roughly how valuable they find this music, though, I’ll say this; the podcasts I’m using are free. Alternatively, you can download an app which allows you to choose your own music instead, which you have to pay £1.99 for. Thus they seem to put a negative value on the music I’m listening to – it’s like a more extreme U2. It’s certainly a strange situation to be in where listening to a free album whilst running (with audio prompts) is more expensive than listening to what they provide.

Today was the same running program as yesterday, the key difference between the days being the lack of enthusiasm. It’s impressive how much harder running becomes when you really would rather be in bed. Nonetheless, I went out and trudged through the alternating 60- and 90-second runs of general disappointment.

Another thing that was different today was the route. The last time I was running I would plan out my route the night before. This time out, the first two runs were just along one of my default routes. I figured this one should try and take a different way, but it turns out there really aren’t that many new and interesting places to run near where I am, since I’ve used all of the obvious ones. So this time I decided to just go for a run, and whenever I came to a junction of some description decide then where I fancied going.

This worked relatively well, actually, and although I was going along roads I knew fairly well, it felt slightly exciting to be able to choose where I was going to perspire across, and possibly expire next to.

That is, until I found the footpath to Narnia.

It’s a footpath I’ve passed quite a few times before, and every time I’ve been surprised to see it, as I’m fairly sure it’s not on Google Maps and I could never quite think where it went. However, every other time I’ve been near it I’ve had a route in mind, so I’d go straight past it. Not today, though. I thought I’d see what wonders awaited me on the other end of it. And I was not disappointed.

As I crossed it, it was a like a bridge into another world. (Bother, I should have called it the Bridge to Terabithia instead. Except I suspect that that’s slightly less well-known than Narnia, and also quite a bit more depressing). There were roads and houses and grass and trees and cars. It was like all the other streets that I’d run down, except that this one was not quite the same. Not in any particularly eerie way, it was just a different street. Oh, and there was a dragon.

Fine, a faun.

OK, it was a woman walking a dog. But I’m sure it’s a different woman that I’ve not seen before, and thus presumably a different dog as well. Unless they do some sort of dog sharing service in this new and mysterious land.

This new and exciting land was pretty cool in my mind for three reasons. Firstly, it’s Narnia and that’s pretty cool. Secondly, I’ve run around the streets near my house so often that it’s quite nice to find somewhere a bit different to run. Thirdly, I couldn’t quite place in my head where this place should be. In the image of the local geography I had in my mind, there just wasn’t room for this street to exist.

Like a slightly sweatier Captain Cook I decided to explore this brave new world I had discovered (and then I decided to write about it like a slightly sweatier Aldous Huxley.) (Incidentally, I googled Huxley to check the spelling of his name, and also to see whether he looked like he’d be more athletic than me. His Wikipedia page describes the genres he writes in as “Fiction. Non-fiction.” I feel like this hasn’t narrowed things down too much).

Having explored this street a bit more, it turns out that Narnia actually lives down a small turning a couple of roads away from where I live – it’s just another turning that I often run past and then forget about. It seems to fit quite well there, so that’s a point for town planners. A somewhat anti-climactic ending, but perhaps this is foreshadowing for an exciting event in a couple of weeks where Narnia rises up and revolts against the nearby corner shop. It probably isn’t, but it might be.

Beyond that, the run was fairly uneventful, and the run ended as it started, in a spectacular medley of exhaustion and indifference. Hopefully some time for napping over the weekend will result in a more cheerful Monday blog.

Cillary Black

Run 2 – The One With The Bonus Run

Today’s run was slightly delayed due to yesterday morning being very soggy. Somewhat disappointingly it rained very heavily between 6 and about 7:30, which meant that pretty much as soon as I’d decided I wasn’t going for the run, it stopped. I don’t quite know how Laura managed to get control of the weather but she’s done a good job.

A quick recap of the first time I ran so that the last paragraph makes sense – Laura was the voice of the last podcast I used, and I’m fairly sure I must have set her house on fire or stolen her car or something, because she never seemed to like me. Why else would she put me through so much physical pain over nine weeks?

I did enjoy the NHS Couch to 5k podcasts, but I thought I’d try a different set of podcasts this time round, if nothing else so it doesn’t feel like I’m going backwards with my progress! Thus, this time round I’m using Ease Into 5k.

The key difference between these podcasts and the NHS ones is that they are substantially more businesslike. There are two creators, who the website assure me are called Alex and Tanya, and two voices on the podcast, one male and one female. The woman identifies herself at the start as Tanya, and the man doesn’t name himself so I’m left to guess what his name is. I think I’ll call him Chad, because he is extremely American.

They both are extremely American, actually. Tanya informed me in the first podcast that I should check with my “health care professional” if I was worried about doing exercise, which struck me at the time as a very American expression, although my housemate subsequently assured me that it is used here quite a lot as well.  The accent is also definitely from the USA, which was what initially tipped me off that they were American.

It appears that Tanya was only there for the very first podcast, though, and disappeared after about a minute of generic dispassionate advice. Instead, I’m left with Chad, who is a man of very few words. His entire vocabulary genuinely consists of “Run”, “Walk”, “Warm-up”, “Warm-down”, “You’re half way there” and “Last run”. The whole process is made much more entertaining by the fact that his voice reminds me of the one that gives you instructions in “Bop It”, and if you don’t know what Bop It is then what on earth are you doing reading this blog when you still have so much of life to discover?

Anyway, I undertook my second run of this new regime today with Chad, the man who clearly wasn’t paid by the word for his time on this project. One slight disadvantage of this method is that if you haven’t looked it up before you have no idea how long you’ll be running for in the session. Apparently this time round was 60 seconds running, 90 seconds walking, 90 seconds running, 90 seconds walking, which was a slight step-up from Monday’s run and definitely pretty much hit my current level of fitness. It’s slightly saddening to think that the residual fitness from the running I did has managed to graduate me beyond the first week, which their website specifically describes as “That’s it. Anybody can do that”.

Still, amid shouts of “Run!” and “Walk!” and “Spin it!” I did the range of exercises that Chad shouted enthusiastically in my ear.  Even starting off today, I felt quite a bit more tired than I had on Monday, and by the end I was definitely aware that my fitness had taken a sharp dive off a cliff - although I’m technically now starting to climb that cliff again, so maybe diving off a cliff isn’t the best analogy. Possibly it’s more like bungee jumping. Except that coming back up with bungee jumping isn’t too much effort, but with the disadvantage that you don’t get back up to where you were before. So maybe it’s a bit more like bungee jumping from halfway up a cliff, and then at the nadir of the jump clinging on to the cliff-face and making a painstaking way back up, hopefully past where I jumped off before and on to the top of the cliff. Yeah, that works. Self-analogy-five. Incidentally, I definitely feel like cliff-face should be one word, but then you’d either need to remove one of the ‘f’s, which would be very sad, or have three ‘f’s in a row, which would be eccentric. I suspect it’s probably supposed to be written cliff face, but that feels too separate, and also like an insult you’d use if you wanted to imply somebody looked a bit too much like Cliff Richard, so I’m hyphenating it instead. Although I reckon I’d rather look like Cliff Richard than an actual cliff-face, so perhaps it’s not quite as a bad an insult as it sounds. I think I’ve got a bit distracted here.  Where was I? Ah yes, running.

Essentially, the gist of that last paragraph was that running is tiring, even though I’m not doing very much at the moment. And there’s definitely a big mountain to climb before I’m going to be even close to considering committing to the 10k. A big mountain with a huge carving of Cliff Richard in the side, like a 60s rock-and-roll Mount Rushmore.

One thing that didn’t help was that Chad’s very limited vocabulary led to somewhat of a miscommunication between us. Since one of his stock phrases is “Last run”, I naturally assumed that when he told me that that it would be the last run. This is the price I pay for getting running advice from a children’s toy. What he actually meant by that was “Last set”, the set consisting of two runs. Thus, I put all my energy into a half-sprint for what I thought was the last run, took a nice recovery walk, and then Chad shouted at me to “Run!” again for 90 more unexpected seconds. Well, it ended up being more like 80 because I got the call to jog just as I was approaching a nice smartly-dressed man with his dogs and figured running headlong at him might concern him a little bit.

I’ve survived thus far, though, which is a good sign. I’m definitely not going to skip another week (I decided to leave the rest of the Week 1 podcasts and move straight to Week 2) but I feel like Week 2 is roughly the level of fitness I currently have. Indeed, I definitely feel too week 2 admit that that pun was not worth straining for and perhaps here is a good place to wind up the blog for today.

I’m still determined to do three runs this week, though, so I’ll be heading out again tomorrow. My intention at the moment is to run Monday, Wednesday, Friday every week to match the 3 runs a week the podcast recommends, but shift it slightly so that I start the new week’s podcast on the Wednesday, so that Monday’s run is a consolidation run rather than a new and unpleasant experience. Save that nonsense for mid-week.

So, barring freak thunderstorms or my muscles taking Chad’s advice to “Pull it!” or “Twist it!”, I shall be back again tomorrow.

George Sake

Rain (briefly) stops play

I woke up this morning to go for run number 2 and discovered a rather large amount of rain. According to the BBC it stops by about 8, which means it appears to be rain specifically designed to stop me from running this morning. Since tomorrow seems to be drier I'll be heading out Thursday and Saturday this week instead.

No pun name sign off today because I already can't afford to use too many of them, my stocks are dwindling rapidly and it's only Week 1.

Reboot: Run 1 - The One Where I Started Again

I feel like the opening paragraph of the restart of the blog should be something deep and profound. Something that encapsulates the grandioseness of the voyage I’m undertaking, like the opening of Star Trek, or a made-up word that explains the size of the task ahead, like “grandioseness”. Unfortunately I’m two sentences into the opener already (now well into the third) and it’s far too late to change so this’ll have to do.

That’s right, I am back on the running horse, although that metaphor makes it sound like I have a horse whilst I’m running. This would make it easier if I was riding it, and significantly harder if I had to lead it.

Some background for those of you who are new to this blog – around the New Year I decided to try and build myself up to running 5k, which I did over the course of 9 joyful weeks, where I chronicled each run in a diary that many are calling modern day’s answer to Samuel Pepys, or rather the question “What is being written today that isn’t as culturally significant or interesting as Samuel Pepys’ diary?”.

This blog then mysteriously stopped around that point – but never fear, reader! I shall give you a quick update of all the running I have done since then.

…

Well, that didn’t take long.

Yes, sadly the running somewhat fell off once I’d finished blogging – once the podcasts ran out I found that I didn’t have the energy to go out and chase them. And so it remained for six months or so.

So what was it that drew me out of my self-induced stupor and back into the world of running? In a word, madness. In two words, I’d probably just add the word insanity. If you asked me to say it in three words, I’d ask you why, because I think it’s abundantly obvious from the previous answers the general gist that I’m going for.

Essentially I have verbally agreed to take part in a 10k next March/April time. This is quite frankly a ridiculous idea (hence the descriptive words in the previous paragraph), and I figured that if I had any chance of covering that distance, and covering it in a vaguely respectable time, I should start running again now. Thus, the aim is by Christmas to be able to run 5kish consistently, and from there to build up to the 10k in early 2015. Then I’ll probably do the 10k and retire from professional sports. That’s the dream.

It was with this in mind that I set the alarm this morning (6:45, not too early) to start my first jog of this new training regime.

Those of you who read my last chronicles of suffering may recall that I used a series of podcasts from the NHS, with a person called Laura who made it her personal goal in life to make me suffer. We didn’t always get along. This time round, I’m going to try a slightly different series of podcasts called “Ease into 5k”. I’ll get on to talking about how that differs from the last series I used in a future blog post – what I will say for now is that they promise to get me running 5k in 8 weeks rather than the 9 that it took me last time. The jury is still out on whether that’s actually possible, we shall see.

I decided to start from the first podcast to see if there was any residual fitness left over from the last time I went out running. The first week is 9 sets of 60 seconds running followed by 90 seconds walking. Last time, when I hadn’t done exercise since approximately the time when S Club 7 broke up, this was more than enough to absolutely exhaust me, and I was interested to see if it would do the same this time round.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised at how fine I felt after the first few sessions. Evidently something in my brain remembered what I’d been doing before, because 60 seconds of running felt much shorter than it did the last time I tried it. It felt like I was just starting to get into a rhythm when the run was suddenly over and I was walking again. At one point half-way through I decided to keep going past when it told me to walk, and ended up running for 2½ minutes, stopping just as it told me to run again. I was quite pleased with this, and it also felt a little bit like rebelling against the system.

Towards the end, though, and perhaps fuelled by over-exuberance, my body did start to ache a little bit. Not in an “I’m exhausted” way (by the end I definitely could have kept going for a bit longer) but in a “Right, I see what you’re doing here. We made a committee to discuss this, and the general consensus among the rest of your body parts is that we’re really not very happy about all this” sort of way.

I feel like perhaps my body didn’t quite understand what was happening at the start, which explains why it might have felt OK to begin with:

Ah, running. Good idea, there’s probably a bear chasing us or something. Being eaten by a bear definitely ruins your morning, so it’s probably best to get jogging for a while.

Great, we’ve stopped now. That was close. Back to pleasant walking. Isn’t this a lovely morning? Bit cold but… oh, wait, we’re running again. Bear must have caught up. Fair enough, they are often quite persistent. Nothing a bit of light jogging won’t solve, let’s make this feel pleasant. No being eaten today, Mr Bear.

Yep, all escaped this time. There’s no way that bear’s finding us now that we’ve run away from it twice.

Hm, looks like it has. This is strange, actually, it reminds me of a few months ago when we used to be out three times a week in the morning to run ridiculous distances. Glad he hasn’t taken any silly notions to try that recently…

…

Oh no.

Despite body protestations, I finished relatively happy, feeling relatively comfortable, and confident enough that I’m going to move straight onto Week 2 next time out, which will almost certainly be too much effort and cause me to regress, weeping, to a week with a negative number. But we shall see.

Last time on the blog I signed off every entry with a running-based celebrity pun name. Unfortunately www.runningbasedcelebritypunnames.com is now defunct and it redirects to www.namesofcelebritiesthatcanbechangedslightlytosoundlikeavegetableorotherfoodstuff.org.nz, which will have to do for now.

Caulin Flowerell