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