EGGSHAUSTED

So yesterday saw the last pre-Easter gym run – as the place is closed until next week. Any number of poor eggscuses (blisters, work, eating too close to session, too many ‘rest’ days due to blisters bla bla) come to mind for this not-quite-completed session – but all I know is that 5 minutes before the end I felt hot, bothered, light-headed, faint and generally queasy and had to walk the last 5 minutes. So this one probably cannot be ticked off the list and I am set back one session.

Never mind. The new red iPod was tested and it’s eggcellent. Now that I’m all kitted up, I’m thinking of NOT waiting until Boston to do my first race, but do the Dulwich Fun Run (5K or 10K) on 9 May. Luckily, I have sussed that the word ‘fun’ added to the title of any ‘race’ flags up that it isn’t really a race at all – even at 10K – but a flat park wobble charade eggsclusively for people with no clue about running, i.e. me. Perfect.

Stats

Week 11 of 13. What I was supposed to do: 40 minutes run. 1 minute walk. 10 minutes run. 51 minutes. What I actually did was: 40 minutes run. I minute walk. 5 minutes run. Session 3 of 3. Walk pace: 4.5 km/h. Run pace: 6.8 km/h.

WEEK 10

Due to a few urgent work projects and the Great Banana Cake Debate (should I go to the gym OR should I make a banana cake?), I didn’t leave the house until well past six o’clock – in fact half past – and rolled up at the gym at 6.45 pm only to find it chocca with the nimble ones heaving away on all the machinery instead of being out getting drunk and having a good time. How on earth are they going to look back with fondness at their university years when all they did was read Dan Brown on an exercise bike? Anyway – evenings at the gym are a no-no. Because it was full, there was more noise from the machines which made them turn the god-awful music up even louder which meant my iPod had to blast my ears even more to drown out the decibel deluge around me. Grim. The generally accepted idea that gyms are tedious to run in is gaining ground, but there is a choice here: boredom or pain. For now, I choose boredom. I want to finish this programme as soon as I can as I’ve already been faffing about with it for far too long.

I will do the banana cake tomorrow. Such are the breathless plans here at the Shunningrunning Central Committee. I think I need a holiday.

Hair of the blog

Still none.

Blog’s bollocks

Week 10 of 13. 10 minutes run. 1 minute walk. 44 minutes. Session 1 of 3. Walk pace: 4.8 km/h. Run pace: 6.7 km/h. Walk pace slightly increased.

INFIDELITY

Last night I strayed away from the running blogs (coz you runner blogger buggers DON’T BLOG ENOUGH!!) and started looking at other kinds of Internet inhabitants and geeezzz – talk about opening the door of the Fritzl cellar by mistake. Even my little corner of London is awash with brave and erudite bloggers fighting alcoholism, adultery, depression, abuse, child molestation, miscarriages of justice, OCD, death and divorce (and those were just the fun blogs) while frying their brains and nervous systems in despair and medication. A sonorous howl indeed. The frightening thought is that these are the blogging classes, the ones with computers and houses and education laughing through their tears as they pop another serotonin inhibitor – there must somewhere be another, far more cumbersome door behind which the voiceless are attempting to scream. I am shocked by and admire these bloggers for their willingness to be as honest as they are. I could never do it. I closed the door.

So it’s with some relief I return to the prim and pristine neutral moral ground of the running blog to announce that Week 9 is now done.

At the risk of providing the dreaded Too Much Information, I found today hard – but not in a physical way. I was never out of breath and I had arrived at the gym with high enough levels of TWITT (The Will and Intention To Train) and the programme for today said only 50 minutes. But it seemed in some way mentally harder. Maybe it’s because I’m actually starting to run properly and I glowed so much, I even had to use THE HANDTOWEL which so far has sat at the bottom of my bag and seen no use at all. Now I’m even glowing between my fingers. Is that normal or do I have some rare and mysterious digit malfunction? Oh, for the days of a leisurely dry-fingered stroll of 4 minutes and a charade of a run for 1 minute as one weaved amongst the evangelists and pimps! The nostalgia! The innocence of being an unwitting finger freak…

Hair of the blog

None whatsoever at all. I just can’t face it. Much less after the blogs I read last night.

Blog’s bollocks

Week 9 of 13. 2 minutes walk. 8 minutes run. 50 minutes. Session 3 of 3. Walk pace: 4.7 km/h. Run pace: 6.7 km/h. I did do 8 minutes of running 6.9 km/h, but let’s not get pedantic.

WEEK 9

First of all, daffs are de rigueur. So here are some daffs. I couldn’t find any in the vicinity of my sickbed (see below) so had to download them from where they grow on the Internet. Anyway – I was not looking forward to the start of Week 9 which was probably why I let things get in the way for the rest of last week and then I couldn’t fit in the gym on Saturday due to doing nothing remotely important other than overseeing a blind being put up in the bathroom – and then that day was gone. But yesterday I managed to get to the gym at lunchtime and punch in for Week 9. It was warm, the nimble ones were sunbathing on Goldsmith’s Green and the air of spring Sunday was complete.

The programme at this point ups the running in the run/walk charade from 5 to 7 minutes (which in percentage terms is…erm…quite a lot), but then cleverly throws in a nice 2-minute walking break in between to compensate which made things easy and Session 1 of this week was done painlessly. I even managed to increase the walking pace a bit and ended up expending a massive 500 calories. OK, I would have used up the odd 80 if I’d just stayed in bed for that hour, but even so…

Hair of the blog

Masses – due to friends coming round last night and wine being opened in an uncontrolled way. Consequently, spent most of today in bed – plunging to such depths of loathsome hideousness that many rash promises have been made. Although hangovers are of course simply yet another bi-product of Beelzebub’s ever-prolific bottom, maybe they are there to ensure that the human race does not poison itself into oblivion in the space of a week. On the upside, I did no work whatsoever and instead watched The Last King of Scotland on DVD. I will never ever ever ever drink anything alcoholic ever again.

Blog’s bollocks

Week 9 of 13. 2 minutes walk. 7 minutes run. 63 minutes. Session 1 of 3. Walk pace: 4.7 km/h. Run pace: 6.7 km/h.

DONNER UND BLITZEN

Notice, please, the reduction of rest days between sessions. I last went to the gym on Sunday and today is only Tuesday. The gym scores again. I am now staring down the barrel of the Mauser that is Week 9. Lunchtime saw the same subdued selection of dutiful gurlie students in tandem on the treadmill and side by side on the exercise bikes. One brought a magazine – which I suppose is a step in the right direction from the book of last week. The gurlies didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves very much. In fact, they looked really glum. But the bright young things of today have obviously wised up and are doing it all the right way round. If only I’d thought of doing things like fitness and concentrating on my course back then and waiting till now to worry myself sick about having a boyfriend, I’d be a hell of a lot stronger on the genitive plural and nowadays I wouldn’t give a toss about the boyfriend angle. Ha! Anyway, that’s Week 8 hit firmly on the head in a painless sort of way and done in the space of a real calendar week – not my usual 10-day running week due to achy ankles and mangled metatarsals.

I loaded some new tyoones onto my iPod and funnily enough ‘Greased Lightning’ has exactly the right beat for a pace of 6.7 kph. You’ve got to be careful, though, when the track slows down at the end or you might see yourself flying off the back of the treadmill in a not very cool way. Notice, please, the six point SEVEN and not six point SIX kph of last session. I’m just forging ahead here. To give some counterweight to the US-dominated running tracks, I went Euro with ‘Von hier an blind’ and ‘Gekommen um zu bleiben’ by Wir sind Helden. Nena’s ’99 Luftballons’ isn’t bad either. This sounds incredibly pretentious. I admit that I wouldn’t have known these tracks from an alpenhorn had they not been recommended to me during a trip to Frankfurt and environs.

Hair of the blog

Last night, purely for forensic reasons, I had to test my new wineglass with the little hand-painted coloured stars. Now some people may think that that sounds just a teensy bit tacky, but in fact it’s an excellent wine glass and what a shame Christmas has just been and gone as a festive goblet it is indeed. I work in the basement so a large wine glass is essential (this one holds probably about half a bottle) so that too many trips up the stairs for refills are avoided. I’m not ready for that kind of hill work yet. Anyway, the forensic tests went off successfully and by the end of the evening everything was twinkling.

Blog’s bollocks

Week 8 of 13. 1 minute walk. 5 minutes run. 54 minutes. Session 3 of 3. Walk pace: 4.5 km/h. Run pace: 6.7 km/h.

A GYM WITH A VIEW

This blog has, I admit, been short on running photos taken with a mobile phone. That’s because my old Nokia E61 had everything but a camera. This was not such a good thing so I recently bought a Blackberry Storm. Big mistake. Although cutting edge snazz, it is heavy, the big screen eats up battery sooo fast and the touchscreen isn’t as responsive as it could be (or not designed for spazfingers like mine). Oh, and it has a very annoying as-you-go spellcheck which won’t let you put in zxyhigog if that’s what you feel like texting to someone. So it had to go. Instead, I got the Nokia E71 which is just the newer version of the E61 but with a camera and done in a nifty stainless steel. But enough mobile phone review and blowing of the Scandinavian trumpet. Suffice to say that Nokia rocks and I can now take interesting photos when I run. Except that they aren’t going to be very interesting as I now run at the gym and will be running there for the foreseeable future if I have anything to do with it. Hence this very interesting photo to kick off the future plethora of interesting photos (this has a jejune air of Pentonville about it).

I got to the gym and warmed up on the exercise bike. By the time I was ready to start the run/walk charade, I discovered that someone had occupied MY treadmill. I mean really. That someone was of course one of the lithe and nimble students who should have been in a dark and draughty room fretting about tomorrow’s essay deadline. Although student probably don’t have those any more. They probably just do some kind of interactive VoIP thing. Now MY treadmill has been carefully selected for location at the end of a row and position directly under a ceiling fan. So the session had to be done on an altogether different treadmill with no ceiling fan luxury, but with, admittedly, a better view of the hail coming down outside. Ha! Take that, pavement runners! Now I don’t have to monitor the weather forecast and gamely try to slot in my running days between rain showers and hail storms, but can bask in my even indoor runs and new-found non-Quasimodo post-run status. My heel has healed, the padded running socks have gone and things are on the up-and-up (whilst remaining firmly at 0% elevation).

Alcohol

None.

Running Progress

Week 8 of 13. 1 minute walk. 5 minutes run. 48 minutes. Session 2 of 3. Walk pace: 4.5 km/h. Run pace: 6.6 km/h.

THE ALL NEW SHUNNING RUNNING

Yes! It’s the all new shiny Shunning Running complete with new masthead, more pages and streamlined categories and links. A cleaner, lighter look replaces the dark tarmac and smelly feet of the past with the coolness of the iced water on the right finely juxtaposed with the sweaty old shoes on the left.

SNEAKY LOOKS

Another successful worship at the tabernacle of the treadmill yesterday. One good thing about the gym (or yet another good thing about the gym) is that you can sneakily look at what other people are doing. All right, most of the people who frequent the gym at Goldsmith’s are 19-year-old students who don’t need to be in there anyway. In fact, why are they in there? Why aren’t they eating cheese on toast, drinking wine out of a bottle and angsting about not having a boyfriend? When I was a student, no one I knew (or had ever heard of) had ever been to a gym. Wasn’t it all Jane Fonda on video? OK, so not much point in sneakily looking at them as they come in girlie pairs and spend more time looking in the mirrors and adjusting their bandanas than gymming, but the place is open to the middle-aged who have not yet abandoned hope and there is satisfaction in seeing one of them stumble off a treadmill all red-faced while my own little charade is still in business despite the fact that the stumblers were probably running properly and not jogging along at my pathetic 6.6 km/h. Some girlie students (the ones not in pairs) come in with a book. They get on the exercise bike – and read! WTF? Unless the book is the literary equivalent of Smooth Criminal, how can reading and exercising be combined? What’s going on? War and Peace? Crime and Punishment? Oliver and…something opposite?

Week 8 is that heady cocktail of 5 minutes running and 1 minute walking. The 50% reduction in walking time from last week makes a difference. The walking (resting) time now seems incredibly short. On the upside, it means I ran for 50 minutes in total yesterday and could still hold a conversation throughout and didn’t feel like collapsing at the end – and I can still walk today. As the 13-week programme started with the running segments lasting 30 seconds (which at the time actually seemed about the limit of my capacity) and has now reached 5 minutes, it is a form of progress. I’ve just sneakily looked at another running blog where the blogger took over a year to reach a run of 30 minutes. Yo – I’m still ahead.

Alcohol

None.

Running Progress

Week 8 of 13. 1 minute walk. 5 minutes run. 60 minutes. Session 1 of 3. Walk pace: 4.5 km/h. Run pace: 6.6 km/h.

NON-RUNNER

This happened:

First it snowed, then it rained, then all London cabs went on a demo (dose fuckin’ minicabs, innit, darlin’?) – bringing all buses in Central London to a standstill. Of course you couldn’t get a cab anywhere as they were too busy standing around in Whitehall. This wouldn’t have been a problem, had I decided to watch it all on BBC News 24 as usual and not take a rare trip to Piccadilly (where incidentally half the shops seem to have gone bust) just to get out of the house. As the East London line is being repaired for the next zillion years, there was no alternative transport so ended up walking most of the way home. At least, this went some way towards compensating for the week’s idleness on the running.

This momentous trip involved the heady emporium of Waterstone’s where I bought the only Charles Bukowski I haven’t read (how can there be a new one out?), ‘Boredom’ by Alberto Moravia and a treasury of unusual words. ‘Zelotypia’, for instance, is zeal that is excessive to the point of morbidity. Describes my dedication to the walk/run charade perfectly.

Running will be resumed when meteorological conditions permit.

THE CLASS STRUGGLE

It somehow feels WRONG to drive to the place where you are going to run. But sacrificing another penguin also feels so totally worth it when one can skip among the tea houses, bandstands and observatories of Greenwich Park with the rangers in their smartly polished vehicles tipping their caps in a jolly good morning as one breathes in the meadowsweet and honeysuckle and the complete absence of the proletariat.

Greenwich Park on a misty morning with the sun attempting burst-through is a bourgeois running dream – the avenues and shady, tree-lined paths, the preamble at the tea house, the touristless meridian, the tender hum of commuters crossing the park on their way to some hard graft at the gift shops and cake emporia below. Doing my three/two walk/run formation charade was nothing short of nice – only marred slightly by a pain in my right heel and no Pay & Display machines working. However, I soon woke up among the pimps and Ghanian evangelists again. I’ll take the bus next time, I promise.

Alcohol-free Day 8

Had a whisper of a craving at 6 pm, but withstood the urge to zoom out for a bottle of Spar’s best white wine. Life is certainly interesting.