Week 101 – The One With The New Podcast Idea

Progress has been slow in this past week (and no, Progress is not a new nickname I’ve given myself, apt though the sentiment might be for this sentence). I’ve only been for two runs, on Monday and Friday, due to some lingering concerns about leg pain.

I seem to be getting very strong messages from my legs that maybe running isn’t the best sport for me. I’d probably be better off with one of those ones where you spend a lot of time sitting down, and for good measure with very little use of arms too. Maybe pool, or darts. Certainly the Couch to Playing Pool process would be a bit more interesting, especially if the couch in question was in the same room as the pool table. They’d struggle to stretch that out over 8 weeks:

Week 1 – Consider getting up from the sofa, and then realise there’s something interesting on the TV and watch that instead.

Week 2 – Realise you’re getting quite hungry. Do a 3-minute verbal workout on the phone with a pizza delivery company to convince them to bring your food straight to the couch.

Week 3 – Do the same amount of verbal gymnastics to persuade the recycling men to come and collect your pizza box without you moving.

Week 4 – Get off the sofa, take two tentative steps towards the pool table, then say “No, that’ll do me for now” and go and lie back down.

Week 5 – Try and devise an ingenious method of playing pool from the sofa, either by designing some contraption to pull the table towards you or by sticking several cues together to make a supercue you can play pool with from a very long way away.

Week 6 – Call the prototype company they use in The Apprentice that can seemingly build anything and ask them to send somebody to your sofa to discuss your idea. As soon as they arrive tell them that the idea is awful and won’t work, but you do need somebody to play against.

Week 7 – Make a committed effort to get towards the table by moving to sit on the floor halfway between the sofa and the table. To prevent backsliding set the sofa on fire as you leave. Spend some time staring wistfully into the flames as you contemplate the exhausting journey you’ve been so far, and then endure the strict lectures of the firefighters about how setting furniture on fire is not a legitimate motivational tool.

Week 8 – Get the fireman to carry you the rest of the way to the table and ask him if he knows how to play pool.

Congratulations – you are now ready to move on to the next series of podcasts, “Lift a Pool Cue in just Six Months!” ™

That series of podcasts does sound a little bit more enjoyable, and a bit less painful. After my two week layoff I talked about in my last post, it was really pleasant to start the first run back without various parts of me hurting from the word go. Unfortunately that pleasure was short lived, and even though Monday’s run wasn’t too bad, by Tuesday I was starting to feel a bit of pain again. It’s too early to say whether I’ve managed a return to shin splints, but I figured an extra couple of days rest wouldn’t hurt (literally) and took Wednesday’s run off.

This morning was the last of the week 4 podcasts (4 minutes running, 6 minutes running, 4 minutes running) and they seemed to go well enough. The 6 minute run in particular seemed to go better than either of the 4 minute ones – the first one I did too quickly which meant I was still quite tired by the time the 6 minute one started, but by the end of the 6 minutes I’d managed to get into a rhythm – which was subsequently disrupted by stopping and starting again with a 4 minute run a minute or two later.

Week 5 is where the podcasts do something different every day, which I remember being quite an exciting time last time out. It’s still short bursts of runs but the aim by the end of Week 5 is to do 19 minutes total running, which does almost seem achievable.

I’m slightly frustrated to be honest that the leg issues seem to be putting a dampener on the motivation. I find it hard enough to get up and go for a run in the morning before a day pretending to work at university, without the additional burden of “If you do this, it will hurt you at the time and hurt you later as well”. It’s like they tried to give both sides of the equation an equal weighting of pros and cons, but then accidentally got things muddled up and put all the cons on one side.

I’m hopeful that this time round, I won’t have any incidents like I did three weeks ago, and I hope to keep going now through until the end of the 8 week series of podcasts and get up to running 5k by Christmas. If it gets to the point where I can’t actually walk after a run, though, I might revert to blogging about the great new series of podcasts Learn To Throw A Dart In Sixty Easy Sessions.

Channing Tatumato

Week 100 – The One With The Update

Those of you who noticed that this blog had disappeared for a couple of weeks (and the beauty of English means that this sentence can indeed refer to a single person) are probably owed an explanation.

After my Les Miserables-themed last blog post, I concluded that I’d managed to pick up shin splints – my very first proper running injury. The NHS website I looked at has a long list of people who are most at risk of getting them, and the top two they list are people who “have been running for less than five years” (which I would have thought would be most people, to be honest, I don’t know many people who run for more than an hour or so at a time) and those who “run on hard surfaces or slopes”, which will be me until my continued petitions to the council to make pavements out of jelly are accepted.

The website also says that it’s very important not to “run through the pain” since that will only make things worse – as my experience last time writing showed, that does indeed happen. Fortunately there’s no treatment or anything required. Just giving it a solid two weeks rest should sort it out, and this is exactly the sort of medical advice that I can cope with.

So that explains the roughly two-week pause in updates, which was due to me sleeping instead of running. I have been running subsequently (today was my third time out since the event) but this leads to another problem at the moment, which is namely that I’ve done all of this before. It’s quite hard to write about a repeated experience, especially since the residual fitness I was carrying to begin with has faded and it’s essentially feeling the same as doing it for the first time. The podcasts are helpful but are almost exclusively music (and, in fact, the music is stuff repeated from the NHS podcasts so it’s not even new drivel to listen to).

In short, I don’t really have too much to say about the runs, and certainly not enough to write a new blog post every time I go for a jog. As such, I have decided that until I break the 5k barrier (and possibly after that) I’m going to revert to once-a-week updates.

The main issue with this is to come up with a new way of numbering posts. Naturally numbering the weeks makes sense if it’s once per week, but where to start? I started running again 6 weeks ago, I’m currently on the 4^th week of podcasts, but if I’m counting the number of weeks that I’ve actually gone for a run I think this is Week 5 now, with three never-before-broadcast runs. The best solution I figured would be to take the mean of these three options, add 95 for good luck and start at an entirely arbitrary but pleasingly-round 100. (Apologies to those of you who work in bases other than 10).

There’s no actual running update here, other than the fact that I’m still doing it (and it’s much more pleasant when the legs don’t hurt all the time while you’re doing it), but I shall aim to write about this week on Friday.

Calvin Haggis

(The food pun names are staying.)

Run 6 – The One With The Miserable Legs

Something which I am noticing as an increasing recurrent theme for this set of runs is a strong desire to not get up in the morning. I can’t understand why – I mean, why would I want to lie in warmth and comfort when I could be outside exhausted and drenched in sweat?

This morning was one of the ones where the struggle to get up was particularly felt. I was very keen for a while on sleeping for an extra hour and going for a run on Saturday, but the promise of a lie-in tomorrow was enough to get me up and going. Just about, though, and my body definitely wasn’t happy about it. I might need to buy it an extra kidney or something as a present. I think it’d like that.

Another recurring theme of at least this week is my legs going through the five stages of grief when it comes to them. Last week was denial, and I think this week is a combination of anger and depression, in the sense that they seem to be thinking “Man, this is really awful for us. We don’t seem to be able to get out of this, so let’s make it a miserable process so that we don’t have to do this again”. Interestingly, the Wikipedia page for the Kubler-Ross method gives examples of how it applies for people grieving a divorce or substance abuse, but not for those grieving the fact that they’ve recently begun exercise. I feel like an edit is in order.

I was hoping the fact that this weeks’ runs are pretty relaxed by normal standards would get me over the line, but from the moment I started walking I could feel a revolution quelling in my legs, like a lower-extremity Les Miserables. Still, if they wanted to be the stars of their own painful adventure, so be it – I’m still the master of the house as far as the activities I get up to are concerned.

And so I set out, feeling very much on my own and unsupported by the legs that were supposed to get me from A to B, potentially via C and a relaxing café if energy was running low, which it usually is. Instead, though, I seemed to be in some difficulty from the start. The walking to begin with was slightly uncomfortable, but it was when the running started that I had to look down and see if my legs hadn’t been replaced with needles or something. It wasn’t overly painful (although mind you this was only the first attack) but it just made me feel a bit like I’d never run before. This is a feeling you’ll normally find pretty much every day in my life, but this is one of the few times when I reckon that’s not warranted.

For the first run, though, the initial pain subsided after a while, and I thought that maybe I’d just been swindled, that actually my legs were perfectly fine. But then, after the 3 minute run, the walking came back and the second attack began.

It was utterly bizarre, and a theme that continued through the rest of the journey, but it seemed to be at its most uncomfortable during the walks, to the point where starting the runs again was probably the most comfortable part of the journey; by contrast, as soon as the running stopped, suddenly the night of anguish began (if it were night, and the pain was anguish rather than just mildly inconvenient, but the phrasing was necessary).

Still, I decided it was worth going on with the run now that I’d got up and started, and so despite increasing discomfort in the legular region (ask your doctor) I decided to keep going. Each step suggested that this was rapidly turning into a really bad decision, until the confrontation between my legs and the rest of me reached a head just before the final battle, the last jog before the end.

At this point the walks were relatively ponderous, but I was still moving, more or less. But I feel like the legs were trying to make a deal with me, and the bargain wasn’t heavily weighted in my favour. Essentially they said to the rest of my body “By all means, finish the run. But after that, if you expect us to bring him home, you have another think coming”.

And so it must be. I finished the run, and my legs pretty much gave up. The warm-down walk that I was supposed to do ended up being a hobble as I could barely put weight on either leg. I was probably no more than a two minute normal walk away from home, but it took the full five minute warm-down to get there – at which point, having just about forced my way up the stairs, I took about half an hour to just lie down and try and get to the point where I could stand comfortably again. I didn’t even have my usual post-run water before I lay down, because I forgot to take a drink with me to bed and once I was down I wasn’t getting up again.

Fortunately, after the lie down (where I didn’t fall asleep, sadly – I could have dreamed a dream of comfort which would have been much appreciated at that point) things felt a bit more comfortable, and I suspect that by the end of the day        I’ll have forgotten all about it. I’m quite glad I have the weekend to recover, though- I suspect one day more of this might finish me off. You know what they say – learning to run does put you in a dog eat dog world, and sometimes you feel like you’re in the sewers, asking who am I to put myself through all this. Actually, I don’t know if anybody says that, but it’s probably a good note to end the week on.

Chocolate Fantine

Run 5 – The One With An Adventure In Time And Space

Thus far, the predominant theme I’ve found in my morning runs is how little I enjoy getting up in the morning to go running. When compared with the endless possibilities given by lying in bed, getting up to exhaust myself before breakfast seems somehow the worse option.

Today, though, was the start of a new week, as Wednesdays often are. And I was most intrigued by how this week was going to go, given the promise of the website for Week 3. Namely, this week’s “workout” (I don’t feel like I’m doing enough to make that the right word for it, but anyway) involves a 5 minute warmup, then two lots of 3 minutes running, 2 minutes walking, 1.5 minutes running, 2 minutes walking, 3 minutes running, 1 minute walking, and then a 5 minute warmdown. This in and of itself wasn’t overly exciting – what did interest me was the fact that this is advertised as taking 27 minutes in total (and indeed today’s podcast was only 25 minutes). I was most interested to see how they intended to fit 35 minutes worth of things to do in that time.

Fully expectant to be having a Time Lord in my ear today, I set out, bemused but interested to see what was going to happen. Maybe I would learn that one of the tricks of the trade is that time doesn’t work the same for runners as it does for normal people. Perhaps when people run marathons it actually only takes them five minutes from their perspective, it’s just because we’re watching them that it seems so much longer. I was quite excited to become a time traveller, I haven’t been one since next year.

But sadly, in order to discover my new-found powers, I would have to go on a run. (Or, you know, just listen to the podcasts at home in bed. But given the quality of music, having pain in your legs and no oxygen in your lungs can often serve as a pleasant distraction).

The first surprise of the day came during the first three minute run. Chad (the voice on my iPod) had been his usual verbose self, greeting me with a cheery “Warm-up” and then “Run”, and I was perfectly ready for this to be the extent of our communication. But suddenly, in the middle of the run, the music faded out and Chad expanded his vocabulary at me, uttering the wise words of “Two minutes left”. (OK, fine, it wasn’t exactly in the middle of the run.) A minute later I was treated to another new word, with “One minute left”. This was a relatively pleasant development – although for three minute runs I’m not likely to lose how long I’ve been running, on longer runs regular input could be quite useful in helping me to keep track of how I’m doing. Although on a half-hour run I suspect an update every minute might get a bit annoying, so hopefully Chad will discover the gift of silence around that point.

The second surprise came once I’d finished the 1.5 minute run, when Chad came back to inform me that I was “half-way through”, before sending me off on a 3 minute run which was followed by a claim that I was approaching my “last run”. I’d been tricked by this before, and wasn’t quite prepared to believe him, but indeed after one more 1.5 minute run he told me to “warm down”.

This change of pace was somewhat unexpected. It means that this week I’ll only be running for 9 minutes, the same length of time I was doing in the first week (admittedly here in more concentrated bursts). I almost felt a little bit cheated. If I’m going to get up at ridiculous o’clock in the morning, at the very least I want to feel like I’ve done a level of exercise worthy of the time.

On the other hand, the reduced demand on the legs is probably no bad thing. I suspect that I’m not built for physical exertion. The last time I went running I found myself with pretty much constant leg aches and sporadic pains until I stopped for an extended period of time, and it looks like they’re starting to remember this again. My warm-down walk was fairly slow (and a bit longer than normal because, having expected a longer run, I was in the middle of nowhere when I was told to stop), and when I got back I had a nice lie down in bed for about 15 minutes until I felt keen enough to get up again.

In a way, this is a good thing, though. It means that I can be fairly sure that I haven’t missed an opportunity for a career as a marine, or an Olympic athlete, or a not-having-leg-pain-after-running specialist (it’s a job. Probably.) I seem to have a body that’s built for working in an office, and I can cope with this. Sadly, though, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get a job as a Time Lord either; both because it looks like the secret of time travel is a bit more complicated than the podcasts seem to suggest, and also because that too seems to be a job that requires a lot of running, from the documentaries I’ve seen on the BBC.

Peter Garibaldi