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

Run 4 – The One In The Wild

Day 4, and I have been continuing my journey to infiltrate the species known as ‘Enthusiasticus Runna”, more commonly known as the morning jogger.

The joggers are known to operate at all times of day, but this particular species is known for its early rising. It often wears bright plumage at this time of year to stand out from the darkness, presumably to advertise its presence to nearby cars. Sometimes they can be found with earphones in; our working theory is that this reduces the number of operation senses, and thus reduces the chance that their body works out what they’re doing and tries to put a stop to it.

The main mode of transport of the species is a medium-pace run. On the cut-out-and-keep speed charts that come with the paper version of this blog, it lies somewhere between “Stationary” and “Light speed”, which will hopefully give you an idea of the speed of travel. Despite this very narrow band, there do appear to be various sub-classifications within this species, as they frequently vary in pace, as well as the distance travelled.

I have been attempting to blend in with these creatures. I possess my own brightly-coloured coat with which I hope to mimic their appearance, although the mornings have been too warm to use this thus far. With the oncoming darkness early on in the day, though, it may be worth wearing this soon lest I have an unfortunate incident with a carnivorous van in a dark street.

I have also invested in earphones, and a suitably-researched soundtrack. After spending a considerable amount of time deciding what the sounds of the wild are most likely to be, the designers evidently concluded that thudding basslines and electronic sounds were the ones most likely to blend into the background noise.

My audio guide Chad has been talking me through some of the rituals that they go through as they begin their activities. They seem to begin with a “Warm-up”, which is enthusiastically announced. This appears to resemble a walk, except that… no, actually, it really does seem to just be a 5 minute walk.

After this, my induction into jogging begins. At this stage I am still very low in rank and as such am unable to run for extended periods of time, no longer than a couple of minutes at a time. Some very highly trained individuals are able to run for upwards of 40 kilometres in a go, all whilst wearing the fluorescent car repellents. Although the feat is impressive, this does show that the species is somewhat uninquisitive – had these very able people investigated the cars more closely, they may have found a faster and less painful way to travel the same distance.

However, I believe the experiment is going successfully, and the group may be beginning to accept me as one of their own. This morning, in one of the fits of running between sessions of being exhausted, I saw one of the pack jogging the other way.

In such cases, there is an element of power play. When both joggers are running the same way, it becomes what is known as a “race”, whereby the person behind attempts to run fast enough to overtake the one in front, and the one in front has to stop this from happening. I am not certain, but I suspect that if an overtaking occurs, the loser has to give the winner their jacket, so you can tell who the most successful joggers are by how many coats they are wearing. I have yet to experience a jogger with more than one which makes me think that this place must be fairly far down on the foodchain.

I know of no such “race” equivalent for two joggers running towards one another. Generally this ritual seems to involve each jogger committing to a single side of the path and attempting to pass each other without falling off, rather like the ancient sport of jousting, except that lances appear to not be encouraged and horses are deemed to be cheating.

This process reaches its apex at the point of passing, whereby one jogger will utter a (usually relatively breathless) “Morning!” to the other. If there is sufficient respect between the two, the second will reciprocate. I attempted this ceremony this morning and achieved success, hearing a “Morning!” sent straight back to me. Even more impressively, this woman appeared to be much less tired than I was, meaning that I had the respect of somebody much higher up the food chain than I. Although I would have thought I might not actually be on the food chain as people probably don’t want to eat something bathed in sweat.

On the way back to the observatory, I encountered a more common “Canine Exercisium”, or dog walker. I attempted the same procedure but was not reciprocated. Presumably to gain the trust of this species I need to carry around a small hairy lick-y object of my own.

There is clearly much more research to be done here.

David Ate-a-bar-o’ Chocolate.

Run 3 – The One In Narnia

This morning was early.

I suspect the false start on Wednesday followed by running on Thursday and today has probably not helped my body’s perception of things; nor has its curious refusal to go to sleep before about 12.30am. Whatever the cause, when the alarm went off at 6:40 this morning I was none too pleased.

Actually, I started off being more confused than displeased. I’d been at church small group the previous night and I think my dream at that point involved me still being there, and I think I woke up halfway through making a point, to the point where I may have woken up talking. It took me a minute to work out what was happening, and from there it took me about a millisecond to decide that I wasn’t ecstatic about this. Whose stupid idea was it to have a blog about running? I definitely should have started a thrice-weekly blog about naps instead. I could have been the Napster and made sleep-based puns at the end. Maybe it’s not too late for this…

Alas, for now I am stuck with committing to actually get up and run in the mornings. So, with a fair deal of reluctance, I threw on some shoes, before realising that throwing shoes at yourself doesn’t actually help and instead putting them on my feet.

I also realised that I hadn’t downloaded the right podcast for today. There is a separate podcast for each run, which seems slightly odd given the minimal amount of input for each run. Chad, the friendly American voice who won’t use four words when one will do, and who won’t express any sentiment requiring more than ten, says exactly the same thing in each podcast, and I guess the only variation would be in the music that’s played.

The NHS podcasts I used last time often had relatively friendly tracks, stuff that wouldn’t be out of place in an alternative-universe Heart FM. These podcasts rely on high-tempo electronica, which is admittedly not too bad for running to. As an indication of roughly how valuable they find this music, though, I’ll say this; the podcasts I’m using are free. Alternatively, you can download an app which allows you to choose your own music instead, which you have to pay £1.99 for. Thus they seem to put a negative value on the music I’m listening to – it’s like a more extreme U2. It’s certainly a strange situation to be in where listening to a free album whilst running (with audio prompts) is more expensive than listening to what they provide.

Today was the same running program as yesterday, the key difference between the days being the lack of enthusiasm. It’s impressive how much harder running becomes when you really would rather be in bed. Nonetheless, I went out and trudged through the alternating 60- and 90-second runs of general disappointment.

Another thing that was different today was the route. The last time I was running I would plan out my route the night before. This time out, the first two runs were just along one of my default routes. I figured this one should try and take a different way, but it turns out there really aren’t that many new and interesting places to run near where I am, since I’ve used all of the obvious ones. So this time I decided to just go for a run, and whenever I came to a junction of some description decide then where I fancied going.

This worked relatively well, actually, and although I was going along roads I knew fairly well, it felt slightly exciting to be able to choose where I was going to perspire across, and possibly expire next to.

That is, until I found the footpath to Narnia.

It’s a footpath I’ve passed quite a few times before, and every time I’ve been surprised to see it, as I’m fairly sure it’s not on Google Maps and I could never quite think where it went. However, every other time I’ve been near it I’ve had a route in mind, so I’d go straight past it. Not today, though. I thought I’d see what wonders awaited me on the other end of it. And I was not disappointed.

As I crossed it, it was a like a bridge into another world. (Bother, I should have called it the Bridge to Terabithia instead. Except I suspect that that’s slightly less well-known than Narnia, and also quite a bit more depressing). There were roads and houses and grass and trees and cars. It was like all the other streets that I’d run down, except that this one was not quite the same. Not in any particularly eerie way, it was just a different street. Oh, and there was a dragon.

Fine, a faun.

OK, it was a woman walking a dog. But I’m sure it’s a different woman that I’ve not seen before, and thus presumably a different dog as well. Unless they do some sort of dog sharing service in this new and mysterious land.

This new and exciting land was pretty cool in my mind for three reasons. Firstly, it’s Narnia and that’s pretty cool. Secondly, I’ve run around the streets near my house so often that it’s quite nice to find somewhere a bit different to run. Thirdly, I couldn’t quite place in my head where this place should be. In the image of the local geography I had in my mind, there just wasn’t room for this street to exist.

Like a slightly sweatier Captain Cook I decided to explore this brave new world I had discovered (and then I decided to write about it like a slightly sweatier Aldous Huxley.) (Incidentally, I googled Huxley to check the spelling of his name, and also to see whether he looked like he’d be more athletic than me. His Wikipedia page describes the genres he writes in as “Fiction. Non-fiction.” I feel like this hasn’t narrowed things down too much).

Having explored this street a bit more, it turns out that Narnia actually lives down a small turning a couple of roads away from where I live – it’s just another turning that I often run past and then forget about. It seems to fit quite well there, so that’s a point for town planners. A somewhat anti-climactic ending, but perhaps this is foreshadowing for an exciting event in a couple of weeks where Narnia rises up and revolts against the nearby corner shop. It probably isn’t, but it might be.

Beyond that, the run was fairly uneventful, and the run ended as it started, in a spectacular medley of exhaustion and indifference. Hopefully some time for napping over the weekend will result in a more cheerful Monday blog.

Cillary Black

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