Week 4 Run 2 – The One Where I Raced A Milk Float

This morning was very exciting. On Monday evening my exciting fluorescent jacket arrived, forcing me to learn how to spell the word fluorescent. (It’s from the Greek, meaning “Seriously? You put the ‘u’ before the ‘o’? Whatever, English language, go nuts.”)

Here is a link to it (make sure you put sunglasses on before clicking) - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005CNX2XW

This jacket is a thing of beauty and makes me feel very professional when I’m out running, and very visible. Not just to passers-by – I’m fairly sure now that when I go out in that, I become the man-made thing most visible from space.

Nevertheless, I braved the outside world again for another run of semi-murder. Today was still quite tiring (the same program as on Monday, so sixteen minutes in total spent running) with the usual combination of interesting faux music (today we had the delights of fake U2, and what I would tentatively suggest was fake Jay Z, except that that I can’t tell the difference between most rappers when I hear them so it may well have been actual Jay Z for all I know) and confusing advice.

The one that got me today was the advice for dealing with a stitch, which was to push your stomach out when you breathe in, and relaxing it as I breathe out. I’m sure the reason I’m being told to do this is because I don’t do it already, but I’m not sure that’s physically possible.

OK, I’ve just tried it sitting down and it’s actually not as hard as I thought it was. Maybe all the running was depriving my brain of oxygen and so I couldn’t work it out. But then surely if my brain was running out of oxygen, one of the last processes to be shut down would be the bit that works out how to get more of it. That’d be like making some redundancies at a restaurant by getting rid of all the chefs and just keeping the waiters. I’m sure Heston Blumenthal would still charge a fortune.

The exciting point in today’s run was chasing a milk float, which happened to be parked just up a road I started running down, and was moving in fits and starts down the road. It was good – I’d run past it, then it would finish delivering milk and drive past me, park further up the road and I’d run past again. It was like Usain Bolt against whoever ends up coming second against Usain Bolt.

Except that at one point (a fairly terminal point, in fact) the float overtook me, did a 3 point turn in a side road and started coming back the other way. That’s something you don’t see too often in the Olympics – Bolt getting halfway down the 100m track, turning around and heading back to the start line. He’s fast enough that he could probably do that and still win, but I reckon going in the opposite direction would be grounds for disqualification, and so I’m claiming the competition win and the corresponding gold medal there.

Who’d have thought it? Four weeks in and I’m already apparently faster than cars and Usain Bolt!

Run Wheezely.

EDIT: The automatically-generated URL for this entry is "One where I raced milk". Maybe a challenge for another day, albeit I suspect a somewhat easier one.