Week 7 Run 3 – The One With The Race Against Myself

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to measure your progress. This was what I told myself last night, anyway, as I was trying to work out my route for this morning. You see, way back in the annals of time known as Week 5 Run 3, I did my first distance run, which was 20 minutes long. For the occasion I picked the flattest route I could, was shattered 15 minutes in and managed to stumble along to the finish line.

Now, we’re two weeks later, with a bit more distance running under my belt (although who wears a belt running? Maybe a black belt if you’re running through an 80s action movie and need to defend yourself) I figured it might be good to try and measure my progress, to see if I’ve got any faster in the past two weeks of training.

So I set off on the same route as I took two weeks ago, determined to show that smug me from the past that I had improved substantially since then. I can’t let the past win; that would be madness! (In particular, a message to future me; if you decide to race present me, I won’t begrudge you the win if you go faster. If you go slower, though, then ha! Take that, you lazy future person with your hoverboards and your running shoes made out of lasers and alien tears! [I’m excited about the future]).

Unfortunately, from the word go, things were a bit odd, since muscles in my legs that I don’t remember having before suddenly decided they were going to be very sore and not work properly, so for the first minute or so it felt like I’d never run before and was only just discovering that I had limbs. So the start was less a jog and more some sort of bizarre shuffle, like a man with a wooden leg trying to cross the massive wordsearch at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Having overcome that minor first hurdle, the running became a bit more natural. I don’t think I slowed up too much for the first fifteen minutes or so – occasionally I felt myself easing up a bit, and decided to keep the pace going. I wanted to see the look on my face when I beat me later on. (This would require the bathroom mirror and a minor piece of acting).

Part of the issue with this race was that I knew where I’d started and where I’d finished, but no idea what any of the time markers were in the middle. This meant that I frequently alternated between thinking I was miles ahead of past me, and feeling that I’d never be able to catch that arrogant young man who didn’t even know who was going to win the women’s curling at the Olympics. (What an idiot!)

Around the 15 minute mark I started to really run out of energy and the pace slowed slightly, as it had done two weeks ago. I don’t know whether I would have taken it more slowly had I not had that competition to drive me forwards, but I could see the point approaching where I’d stopped last time, and I knew that as soon as I heard Laura speak again that would be it.

For the last 100m or so before I reached the point I’d hit last time, I was convinced that I wasn’t going to make it as far. Even as I got about 10m away I was sure I wasn’t going to hit it.

I ended up going about 10m further.

There was a combination of relief and no small amount of disappointment. I think in the back of my mind I was hoping to be sprinting past my previous stopping point and storming way into the sunset (well, sunrise, but past me isn’t to know that), with crowds around me cheering, throwing money and shouting “You’re the best!” That, you may be surprised to learn, didn’t happen.

What I was slightly surprised to discover was that I still had a reasonable amount of energy left to take on the 5 extra minutes. Maybe I hadn’t gone faster but I was definitely able to go further than the good-for-nothing pretender that stopped there gasping for breath. No, I stopped gasping for breath a good half a mile further down the road. There was even a ramping up in speed at the end.

The run felt like one of the best I’d done, and I was slightly disappointed again when I got back and discovered that it was still just 2.5 miles, the same as I’d done on Wednesday. Still, I guess it’s only going to be small but significant bits of progress at this point, and hopefully that’ll continue.

To stop present me feeling too smug, on my walk back to the house I was overtaken by a man jogging who must have been in his 70s, who was probably jogging faster than I had been. I like to think that at some point in the 2060s I’ll discover a time machine and come back to Kenilworth in 2014 to remind myself that there’s still plenty of work to be done.

28 minute runs next week. The final push to reach 5k begins.

Joggy Depp

Week 7 Run 2 – The One With The Wall

Today is a good day to talk about the wall.

I've never seen a formal definition of this phenomenon, but as I understand it, you hit the wall when you've been running for a while and you're fairly sure at this point you've used all the energy in your body and your skin starts to turn green as chlorophyll creeps in in a desperate attempt to photosynthesise to make up the energy deficit in your body. Either that or you actually physically hit a wall, which is not recommended.

Of the two, I actually did neither. The latter didn't seem like a good idea, and the former wasn't possible because I was wearing my reflective jacket and was therefore the biggest light source in the area, and you don't see many plants on the sun.

What did happen, though, was a lot of exhaustion about ten minutes into the 25 minute run. I suspect part of the issue was the realisation on Monday that the pace I was doing meant that I wasn't going to be finishing the 5km run in the 30 minutes, due to having the stamina of a sloth on a spa weekend and the speed of a First Great Western train under normal conditions - neither any good at all. So I decided to pick up the pace for the first few minutes, to start enthusiastically as I mean to go on. Unfortunately my body took that to mean that it would be mean if I went on, and subsequently decided to have an oxygen party to which I wasn't invited. This meant that the final 15 minutes were very miserable and very slow, like the anti-Usain Bolt.

It didn't help that I managed to get slightly lost again. At the start of this week's podcast Laura told me that maybe I should consider changing my route if I was finding it a bit boring. This was one situation where I have been way ahead of her - I don't think I've done the same route twice yet. This has however led to no small amount of poring over Google Maps the night before the run to try and plot out an alternate route, and also leads to situations like today where I ended up with a very convoluted path to take - and jogging along whilst trying to remember "Left to the end of the road, left again, right, second right, first right, left at the end of the road, right then left", it's very easy to accidentally put in another right and discover a whole new road. (A new fantastic point of view).

But I did manage to finish the full 25 minutes, and furthermore ended up going 2.5 miles today, slightly further than Monday or Friday. And all I had to do for that extra 7 yards a minute was use every available ounce of energy and finish feeling like I'd overdosed on air. Still, I broke the 4km barrier (possibly by running very hard into the wall just in front of it), and maybe 5km isn't so unattainable after all.

The leg pain that had somewhat disappeared by Monday has now come back, though. On the one hand, it makes running a bit of a pain in more than one way; on the other, it’s nice to have a fitness problem which can be resolved by spending more time lying in bed. Now there’s an Olympic sport I could get behind!

Breathe Ledger

Week 7 Run 1 – The One Where I Went At A Blistering Pace

 Thus dawns a new week, a week hopefully of dryness and me not dying whilst running. So far I can claim a big positive on both fronts, as you may be able to tell since I am able to write this, suggesting that I am both alive and not so soggy that I cause the internal workings of my laptop to break.

All this week, the running plan is simple in theory – just 25 minutes straight running. And signs are good for the first run of the week, in that I was able to finish without too much suffering. The final five minutes, once again, did cause me to slow down quite a bit, but I was surprised at how OK I was feeling even after 15 minutes or so; the occasional small stitch but nothing that would slow me down unduly.

A small concern at the moment is the distance being travelled – both today and Friday, I managed to run 2.4 miles (or 3.8km if you’re more of a metric person) in 25 minutes, which doesn’t quite extend to 5km in the allocated 30 minutes, unless those final five minutes involve one of those boosts that you can get in Mario Kart that make you a lot faster than everybody else because you’re way back in last place and really need it. I’m not overly worried at the moment, though, I think this is supposed to be a time of building up stamina and getting through the time, and once that’s a bit more settled hopefully it’ll be easier to go faster.

We’re back to one podcast per week which means I get to experience Laura in my ears twice more saying exactly the same thing. This time, though, she really didn’t say too much at all – at one point I was starting to get quite worried about her. She’d checked in to tell me that I’d run for 5 minutes, and then there was a long period of conspicuous silence. I was starting to get worried about her – maybe she’d got lost? Maybe she’d actually been running and not come back? Turns out it was neither of these things, it was just a long wait between the 5 minute mark and the 12½ minute mark. And by wait I mean run.

When she came back, though, she made quite an entrance, telling me that I should build stamina by “getting as many kilometres under my belt as possible”. Now I took exception to this – I may have gone up a belt notch or two in the past year, but I certainly haven’t put a whole kilometre on!

The race opportunity of the day came at about the 15 minute mark, when I was overtaken by a relatively sedate cyclist, who couldn’t have been going more than a mile an hour or so faster than me. Part of my brain suggested that it might be a good idea to let him be my pace-setter. The rest of my brain overruled it, suggesting that that might lead to me also getting a pacemaker. So I let him cycle off into the sunrise and focused on putting one foot in front of the other (although the foot that I put in front of the other foot kept changing – if this wasn’t the case then this might explain the slow speed).

I managed to finish today, which I’m counting as a win. And, as an extra bonus now that I’m “officially a runner” is that I now have my first running blister! I shall wear it as an uncomfortable badge of honour. I reckon it’s probably because of the shoes that I run in, which I think are giving up the ghost. By that, I mean that they died a very long time ago, so long that even the ghost that used to haunt them has decided it’s not really worth it any more.

If any local businesses (or come to that, international businesses) are reading and want to buy me a new pair of running shoes, I would be happy to offer you some free advertising in return. After all, I have literally some readers now!

Bliz Turley (a combination of blister and Liz Hurley, expressed in such a way as to make neither of those sentiments clear and instead make her sound like an alien from Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy)

Week 6 Run 3 – The One Where I Graduated

I’m not sure if time is going backwards this week. I’ve spent most of the week exhausted, but woke up this morning not feeling too bad, and almost ready for the run. Given how the other two have felt, this feels very much like a Monday morning in that respect. But hey, if time’s going backwards that means I have two days off to look forward to! You don’t get that on your average Friday!

So today Laura wanted me to run for 25 minutes without stopping. Despite the relatively energy I was feeling, this didn’t seem like a good idea. There’s running, which I’m now not completely averse to, and there’s running for 25 minutes, which is starting to sound like something I should only do every four years and get a medal for at the end. (Nobody practices for the Olympics, right?)

On top of my base reluctance, which would be enough to make a stampeding herd of buffalo decide that maybe ordering a pizza and sitting down in front of the TV would be a better idea, I’ve also had increasingly sore legs this week. It’s nothing particularly severe, but I’m getting pains on the inside of my lower leg when I walk every now and again fairly consistently throughout the week. I don’t think it’s getting worse, but I don’t particularly want to aggravate them. (Incidentally, fun fact - the second vowel in “aggravate” is an ‘a’. That was, like, my third guess). I’ve had my legs for as long as I can remember, and if they end up resigning I don’t know how to go about getting new applicants. There’s probably a pun conclusion that I could come up with to that, but I can’t think of it. How disappointing.

This all combined led me to feeling quite concerned about today’s voyage into the unknown. (Although by now I know the bits of Kenilworth around me fairly well, but a “voyage to boldly go where I went last Wednesday” doesn’t sound quite as dramatic). I decided that in order to have any chance of getting through this at all, I would need to take it drearily, laboriously slow. And that was exactly what I did.

It was not an exciting pace to begin with whatsoever. I remember early on passing two snails, one of whom pointed at me (with one of those big foam fingers that they have at ice hockey games in America; snails don’t have hands) and said to the other one “You know what, fellow snail. That guy’s running faster than we can travel, but still appreciably slower than lots of other humans can run.” The fact that I was able to hear that entire sentence gives some indication as to my speed, as anybody who has spent any time with snails knows that they don’t speak very loudly. (Fun fact – if you put a snail to your ear, you can hear the sea. You might need to remove the slimy bit first, though).

So despite trudging along at a pace slower than a unicycle with a puncture, I seemed to be going alright. I got the usual update telling me I was 5 minutes in, which made me worry about how much further I had to go. I ran for a bit longer, and then started to think that surely we were due the 10 minute update soon. At which point Laura promptly appeared in my ears and told me that we’d been going for 12½ minutes! I don’t think I believed her, which may be why I started my post this morning talking about time travel. But I was still alive at this point.

Indeed, a bit later when I got the 20 minute update, I was still alive. This time last week, I was going through the five stages of grief to Laura out loud; this week, I still had a bit of energy left. I hadn’t gone quite as far in the 20 minutes as I had last time (I took a similar route so I could compare) but I was feeling much better for it.

With a minute to go, Laura suggested that if I was feeling OK, I could try picking up the pace for the final stretch to end on a high. The first thought I had is probably unpublishable. The second was “Eh, why not?” And through the rest of that minute I actually managed to consistently accelerate to almost a sprint (by comparison). What if those snails could see me now! (They couldn’t. Fun fact – the snails I talked about earlier weren’t actually there).

So I did end on a high, not feeling too bad at all despite having run for longer than I’ve ever run before. On the way back home Laura told me nice things, which was appreciated – one of them being that I “am officially a runner now”. I feel like I’ve graduated, and can now get a job working as an Olympian or a green bean. If you see me in a mortar board and pestle today you’ll understand why.

Alan Stitchmarsh

Week 6 Run 2 – The One With The Final Recovery Walk

Today was a very sad day. And not just because I found myself getting up at 6:30 to go running again (feeling a distinct lack of motivation this week to venture out into the cold to exhaust myself before my working day has even started). But today was the last day in the plan where there is a recovery walk built in. From here on in, it’s running all the way.

Oh joy.

Today was a straightforward (to understand) 10 minute run, 3 minute walk, 10 minute run. Basically what I had to do last Friday, only with a bit of a break in the middle. I presume it was because of the break, but I finished much less tired than I did on Friday, in that I only felt that half my limbs were going to fall off, rather than believing that they all had and that what I thought was me running was actually a vivid hallucination brought on by dehydration and lack of having a healthy snack.

My legs were still very sore this morning and the first few minutes of the run were not the most comfortable. They do say “No pain, no gain”; although notice that they don’t claim the converse to be true. It could also be the case that “Pain, no gain” holds and it’s just not possible to gain anything. Which would be a pain (and thus not a gain).

Regardless of whether or not there is a causal link between the two, it meant that for the first half of the run I was running carefully because my legs hurt, and in the second half I was running carefully because my chest hurt. Apparently this is supposed to be progress.

The highlight of the run was undoubtedly being able to stop halfway through for a recovery walk, which genuinely did a pretty good job of getting my breath back despite being only 3 minutes. Maybe I am getting fitter and it’s just that my brain hasn’t let the rest of my body know yet that it’s not supposed to hurt. Hopefully the message will get across soon; maybe I should swallow something for them to read that might help accelerate the process. Perhaps an exercise book?

Putting aside running for a second (gladly) I’ve noticed what can only be described as a proliferation of young people on bikes out in the mornings recently. Given that they frequently stop and go up to doors and have brightly coloured bags on, I presume they’re delivering papers, but I prefer to think that they’re all friends and have agreed to meet up this morning, but none of them can remember where they’re supposed to go so they’re cycling round Kenilworth hoping to find somebody, only every now and again they lose hope and decide to try knocking on the door of a nearby house to ask for directions.

There are genuinely quite a lot of them, though. There must be so many that there’s one guy whose sole job is to deliver papers to all the other guys out there delivering papers. But then who delivers his paper? They might end up needing infinite children to do the job. Or I guess he could deliver to himself.

I feel like I should conclude by observing a moment of silence for the recovery walk. I ask you, loyal reader of the blog (unless you’re not a loyal reader, in which case I ask that you ignore the word “loyal” in the above sentence, which should save you a bit of time and would allow you to give two moment’s worth of silence instead) to join me at some point today, just for a second, to walk somewhere and not say something. If you need some space to do that in, here’s a little bit for you:

No flowers.

Rickovery Astley

Week 6 Run 1 – The One Where I Pushed Myself

The alarm went off this morning as per usual, and I really didn’t want to get up and go for a run. Normally it takes until I start running to feel like that, so maybe this is an improvement?

Anyway, I dutifully donned my Jacket of Bright Brightness (+1 to health, -10 to stamina) and my Tracksuit Trousers (+5 to comfort, -5 to coolness, -3 to formality) and went outside (-1 in temperature).

I still find the warm-up walk unpleasant on cold mornings, I really just want to get running and get warm. The nice thing about running is that when you get back (spoiler alert: I did get back this morning) the weather doesn’t seem so cold, even once I’ve been inside, recovered and left to go to uni.

Notice that in the above paragraph, I said “The nice thing”. I’m not convinced there are any others.

For starters, my legs are starting to hurt a bit when I begin to run, which is perhaps not a good thing, but it doesn’t seem to be getting worse so I’ll file it under “Ignore until it either gets better or they need to remove them” and get on with my life.

For a main course, I feel like today’s run was a step back from Friday’s, and I still found it tricky. It was 5 minutes running, 3 walking, 8 running, 3 walking, 5 running; so 18 minutes in total running, more than I’d done in all but one of the previous runs. (That last sentence has a nice cadence. Hey, so does that one! That one didn’t.)

For dessert, I’ll have cheesecake. I always have cheesecake for dessert.

But there’s no time for dessert when you’re running. (More’s the pity, I think I’d be keener if there were). And despite my three-course diatribe against running, I do feel like I’ve made a bit of progress. This largely came in the second run, where I think I must have been feeling the effects of oxygen deprivation because I told myself that I was going to pick up the pace for that one. And so about four minutes in when I was starting to tire and considering slowing down for a bit, I told myself not to and kept the same pace. When Laura told me I only had a minute left to go, I actually managed to pick it up further for the last little part, bounding along like a wounded gazelle, or a speeding bullet just before it’s fired.

Of course, this wore me out and the last five minute jog was done at the pace of a snail in treacle (no thank you, waiter, I ordered the cheesecake) but I did manage to finish. I even gave a friendly nod to a man in similarly bright garb jogging the other way. No more than that, though, because he was jogging to the next set of bins he was emptying and I feel like he might have thought I was mocking him had I said anything.

The final run wasn’t helped by Laura telling me that I should find this last bit simple (it might have been had I not used all my energy earlier), and following this with a song whose chorus was “So easy, so easy” just repeated again and again. Fortunately the diction wasn’t perfect and I could convince myself that he was actually saying “So wheezy, so wheezy” which fitted better.

But I survived another run. When I came back, Laura told me I should have plenty of water, so I took a shower. Seemed reasonable.

Runaldo. (My pun name stocks are running low)

Week 5 Run 3 – The One Where I Was No Longer Rain Main

Somewhat inevitably after my last blog post, it was raining quite a lot this morning. (So much for my ability to control the weather. I'm no longer Rain Man, I'll just have to go back to being Man.). And it was fairly windy. And I was supposed to run for 20 minutes non-stop today. Below is a timeline of this morning

T minus 5 minutes: We began with the standard 5 minute warm-up walk. Except that I was fairly cold as per usual, and quite wet, as per less usual, within a couple of minutes of starting. Laura assured me that, although it may sound quite scary to run this far (which I agreed with) that I’d already done all of the hard work (which I completely disagreed with. Sure, I’d done a fair amount of running, but all the hard work? I suspect this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. Not least because I wasn’t going through the park and wasn’t allowed to walk)

T minus 2 minutes: Pretty apprehensive at this point. And damp. I was damprehensive.

T minus 0 minutes: Started to run.

T plus 30 seconds: Genuinely started to feel a bit tired. This was somewhat of a concern. Also my legs were feeling sore and it was cold and I wanted to go home. So it was a confident start. I reminded myself that Usain Bolt would have been finished a long time ago, and it made me feel good to think that I was a better athlete than him.

T plus 2 minutes: Around this time the first song finished and the second began. I tried to convince myself that the first song was by Meatloaf and therefore I had been running for fifteen minutes already.

T plus 5 minutes: Laura’s voice came through the ether, telling me I’d been running for 5 minutes. Because she’s not totally insane, she didn’t mention the fact that we were only a quarter of the way through the run. Sadly I had worked this out and was not overly thrilled by the idea. She said to slow down if you were getting tired; however, I didn’t really think this was a good idea. I was already going at a pace where I would have been overtaken by elderly tortoises and continental drift, if I slowed down any more I’d probably be going backwards, and faster. So I ploughed on.

T plus 5 minutes and 1 second: I decided that ploughing was not a good idea whilst I was running, so I decided to keep running instead.

T plus 7 minutes: I discovered a bend in a road that I’d run along a good three or four times before, that I didn’t remember seeing before. According to the Internet it has always been there, but I’m not convinced. I think they’re just trying to make me run further.

T plus 10 minutes: Another update from Laura; at this point I’m quite ready for a recovery walk. But no, I’m only halfway through. I consider faking an injury. This was patently a ridiculous strategy since the only person I’d have to convince would be myself, and I knew I’d be lying; but at this point I was prepared to look the other way. And even if I wasn’t, I reckon my legs might have gone on a mutiny.

T plus 12 minutes: I got worried that perhaps my iPod had fallen out at some point along the run. Note that this was whilst I was listening to the music that was coming out of the iPod. Maybe my brain thought that this was what they played in ambulances.

T plus 15 minutes: Laura told me how long I’d been running. I thought that sounded like a good place to stop. She told me that I had five minutes to go. I was not very happy about this.

T plus 17 minutes: I was powering through now fuelled by hydro-electric power and anger at Laura. When I could get enough oxygen there was the odd muttered threat. At one point I said out loud “I hate you Laura, you’ve ruined my life”. At which point I realised I was running past somebody. I really hope they weren’t called Laura.

T plus 19 minutes: Hate wasn’t working. I told Laura that she was great, and very clever, and that I’d run enough, and could I stop now please?

T plus 20 minutes: She let me stop. I did gladly.

20 minutes of running. I never thought I’d do that at the start of the program. I never thought I’d do that on Wednesday. To be honest, 10 minutes in I never thought I would do that. But I did learn one thing through doing it.

I definitely hadn’t done all the hard work already!

Exercisla Fisher