No Run

Apparently sometimes, running with a large blister on your foot results in you hardly being able to walk on it in the evening. With that in mind, and the goal sometime next week of finding shoes that actually fit and aren't very old to run in, I've decided to take the rest of the week off running, and hope that an extra few days of rest will bring my muscles to a state of cautious relaxation before I shock them again on Monday.

Gloria Restefan

Week 8 Run 1 – The One Where Everything Hurt

Years ago, an ancient creator of wisdom by the name of John Michael Stipe wrote a piece of groundbreaking prose, which included the immortal line “Everybody hurts sometimes”. And even though the original source of this wise saying has been lost in the deep mists of 1992, the wisdom lives on, even 22 years later.

The upshot of that deep and profound saying resonating through the ages came back to me this morning as I started running. More than on any other day, things were hurting from the start and they didn’t really ease up too much as I went on. With strains in my right knee and left calf and a blister on my foot it was a promising start.

Today was the first 28-minute run, designed to push me towards 30 minutes next week and ultimately a 5km run (which still seems very unlikely in the allotted time, mind, but it’s something to aim for). In the back of my mind ever since I first started and looked at a route, there’s been a very nice one that I’ve wanted to take which is just under 3 miles. Obviously at the start that seemed far too far to be something I’d ever be able to complete, but I thought it would be good to scope it out today.

Turns out I’m glad I did, because it was not the ideal route for me.

Deep in the pre-iPoddian period of 1985, a predominant thinker of the age gave us the words “If I only could, I’d be running up that hill.” And although the singer may be no longer with us (note: I just checked Wikipedia and apparently Kate Bush is fine so that’s a relief) her words live on.

I have expressed before my general dislike of hills, and so I was very disappointed to discover just how hilly this route was. By normal standards, probably not too much but there were three separate uphill sections to traverse, the third of which was by far the worst, perhaps due to how I was dealing with it.

Often in the last minute of a run, Laura will encourage me to pick up the pace and try and finish on a strong note. Unfortunately I decided to take this tactic on the final hill, pushing myself to keep what little pace I had going. I might even have accelerated a bit as I went up the hill. It must have been less than a minute until I was at the top, but I’d managed to use pretty much all the energy and breath I could muster. Fortunately I was nearly done.

Oh, no, wait. I still had over ten minutes to go.

This tactical decision somewhat stunted my speed in the latter part of the run, meaning that despite the extra three minutes of running time I covered 2.6 miles, barely any more than last time. Looking at the route now, though, I reckon I was doing about a 9½ minute mile before the hill, and about a 13 minute mile afterwards, which is a deceleration from slow to essentially glacial. At the end it was essentially walking pace.

But I did manage to finish once again, which I count as a win. I was in a position where I would have to explain to Theodore Roosevelt that I was no longer a pony – in short, I was exhausted. My warm-down walk at the end was more of a hobble, since that was the best I could manage, and it took me another thirty-five minutes after I got back just to have a shower and get dressed.

The eminent historian and Nobel prize laureate Toni Basil once said “Hey Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey.” This doesn’t really relate to my situation in any way, but the words are timeless and full of wisdom.

At the start of the podcast, Laura laughably told me that I must be getting quite comfortable with long runs after the number I’ve been on. That number, for statistics fans, is six after today. When I had my sixth driving lesson, I wasn’t overly comfortable with driving. After six days at university I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with undergraduate mathematics. When I was six days old, my grasp of Shakespeare was at best flimsy. In short, I’m not sure that six times is quite enough to be getting the hang of something yet.

Seven, though, is another story (seven driving lessons and I was Jensen Button, seven days at university and I was Leonhard Euler, seven days old and I was William Shakespeare which made it a lot easier to interpret my own babblings) so I’m sure by Wednesday I’ll be flying along like Superman if he was forced to jog rather slowly instead of actually flying.

John Hurt (no adaptation required today)

The Mattress Saga

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Now this is a story all about how

My sleeping time got mixed around

And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there.

I’ll tell you how I came to sleep on a bed full of air.

Will Smith certainly does know how to have an interesting mattress story, and I think so do I.

Our story begins back in the distant annals of last month, when I received a letter from Argos informing me that my mattress has been deemed to be unsafe due to failing some fire safety regulations. I have to admit to being completely nonplussed by this state of affairs – to be honest, if there had been a fire in my room and my mattress had gone up in flames, I wouldn’t have been writing to the manufacturers complaining about the lack of fireproofing.

The letter offered some helpful advice on how to avoid any further danger, such as not smoking in bed and not surrounding yourself with lit candles before sleeping. I honestly worry that they even had to write that – when I fall asleep, I am comatose for a long period of time, and I tend to move around a bit. I also tend to be encased in lots of fabric-type stuff. Thus, I would be somewhat concerned about having open flames nearby, unless I fancied waking up on a pyre.

Still, I rang up and spoke to a very nice person from Argos who said that they would send me a replacement mattress, one that was a) more expensive and b) presumably impossible to set on fire or something like that. Their computer system was having a bit of trouble so I was told I’d receive a call the following day to arrange collection of the old mattress and delivery of the new one.

And so cometh the next day, cometh the telephone call. (I feel strange mixing Olde English and modern technology – has anybody connecteth to thine Internet recently?) I’d had a look at a couple of dates in the next week or so that I could do, maybe looking at something in very early February as a worst case scenario.

The best date they could offer me was Saturday 8 March.

This was somewhat of a surprise, but I figured that it was a Saturday, so that would probably be fine, and I agreed, hung up, went back to my desk, and immediately remembered that it was my friend’s stag do on that day. Literally the only Saturday I wasn’t going to be home. That was somewhat unfortunate.

So I called them back to rearrange the delivery. I gave them my order number, told them that the date didn’t work for me and could I reschedule it? Oddly enough the range of dates they had was completely different, and there was a slot free for today (22 February). I was pleasantly surprised and a bit confused that it hadn’t been available twenty minutes earlier, but I agreed and everything was rejigged.

The conversation itself was a bit painful because for some reason I could hear my voice over the phone from the other end, with a delay of about a second. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hold a conversation when everything you’re saying is played back to you with a slight delay, but it is astonishingly hard to form even basic sentences. So I may not have been at my most coherent and was quite keen to end the conversation without asking too many questions. This, as we will shortly discover, might have been a mistake.

I was assured that I would get an email confirming all of this. Which I didn’t (and later discovered that they actually can’t do, so I don’t know what the guy I was talking to was hoping would happen. Maybe a Nigerian prince might happen upon my order number in the process of informing me of the increasing number of very rich relatives who live in Africa and died without a will. Astonishing.)

Which brings me to today.

Around lunchtime the door rang. Well, the person at the door rang, if the door itself rang that would be an incredibly inconvenient experience. I came down and there were two gentlemen saying that they were there to collect the mattress. I asked if they were planning to deliver anything, and they said no. They weren’t wearing any uniforms or anything and I did wonder whether they were just out for a free mattress. However, it seemed unlikely that they would ring random doors on the off-chance that the residents were expecting to get rid of a mattress – and to be honest, if they had, then giving them one that you wouldn’t be allowed to light candles around would probably be due penance for their sins. So I passed the mattress on to them, and they said to ring up if I didn’t get a delivery.

I waited a couple of hours until another delivery I was expecting arrived, and then I decided to ring Argos again, at which point the tale derailed slightly.

You see, when I rang up to get my new mattress, they ended up creating a new order for it without telling me they were doing this, or informing me of the new order number. The original order number that I had for the first mattress I had bought referred only to the return of the first mattress; thus, when I rang up to rearrange the delivery of the new mattress, from the order number I gave them they took it to mean I wanted to reschedule the collection of the mattress, but not the delivery of the new one. Hence today’s mix-up.

I was told that the people who had collected my mattress were out of the area now and wouldn’t be able to return it (evidently they were well on their way to Spain cackling maniacally at the mattress they’d stolen, before disappearing into an explosion because one of them had been smoking) and so I would have to rearrange delivery.

After some haggling we agreed on a new date in a few days’ time for the new mattress to come, and they offered to get me a free airbed to tide me through until then. On the one hand this was quite a nice gesture from them; on the other hand without it I would have been sleeping on the floor for the next four days or so. They offered to deliver it to my local Argos store, which they deduced would be Didcot.

Now, Didcot is about an hour and a half away from where I live at the moment. It is, however, the closest store to my home address where my parents live. At this point I felt a little bit like some cats were having a small barbecue outside, because I was smelling a rat.

A little bit of further enquiry revealed that, although the collection of my mattress was arranged to be at the house where the mattress was at and had been delivered to (a sensible set-up, I thought), the new mattress was scheduled to be delivered to my home address an hour away. I have no idea how they even got hold of that address, since for the previous order everything had gone to Kenilworth where I live at the moment. The only place I can think of that the address would have appeared would have been the address for the cardholder, but somehow they managed to extrapolate from that that I want my new mattress delivered there instead.

So I managed to get that cleared up, which meant we had to rechoose delivery dates; this ended up with a week Wednesday being the next available free slot.

In the meantime, they called my nearest Argos store, in Leamington Spa, to set up the order for my air bed. In the meantime I Googled directions to the store, and worked out how to get there, before my Spidey senses started tingling and I thought it was worth confirming the postcode of the store.

It turns out that there are two Argos’s in Leamington Spa. And the one I’d found on the Internet was not the one that my air bed was going to. That could have been extremely awkward.

So, ending the call I drove into Leamington to collect my air bed. I managed to find the store without too much difficulty. When I got there and gave them my order number, they tried to charge me for it, and understandably looked a bit bemused when I told them that I was getting it for free. I didn’t blame them for doubting me, I wouldn’t have believed me. Fortunately, the person who had taken the call must have been around there and she was able to verify that it was something I was getting for free, and wished me the best in getting everything sorted out.

I brought the airbed back, and after a couple of false starts in inflating it (it has an inbuilt pump at one end, and, as I discovered after about ten minutes of pumping and confusion, a hole at the other end) it is ready to go. Distinctly uncomfortable, but it’s free so I can’t really complain.

So I now have 11 days to enjoy the pleasure of an inflatable mattress, which is much smaller than my bedframe and thus makes the slats rattle if I try and sleep on it. I have friends coming over next weekend and we’ll probably be in the bizarre situation where all three of us will be trying to sleep on the floor in my bedroom.

Oh, and I went on the Argos website just now to check that everything was OK, and the delivery address for the mattress is still set to go to the wrong address.

I don’t really get angry at stuff, so I’m finding the situation more amusing than anything. But I do suspect that over the next 11 days (potentially more if the mattress still gets delivered to the wrong place) I will grow to have a passionate dislike of airbeds. And a very strong desire to keep hold of the next mattress I get. And probably a desire to not use Argos to deliver things in future.

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