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.

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

Films have them, chemicals have them, supermarket sausages have them – in fact any kind of material deemed to contain perilous substances that may constitute a hazard to health or a threat to the environment is provided with appropriate labelling. But running blogs? They have no protection whatsoever. Incredible, I know, to think that currently readers have no immediate way, when they pick up a running blog, of being able to assess the hazardous and unsafe ingredients it may contain. I believe this to be a disastrous oversight by both ISO and OASIS. I am therefore proposing a simple set of mandatory warning signs to be located on the masthead of running blogs which will help to remedy this wholly untenable situation and provide much-needed consumer confidence. In fact, I propose to go one step further and introduce a whole new system of blog-standard warning signs as part of a wider running blog standardisation system which will be ratified by the EU and approved at elevated levels. To kick things off I propose the following sign:

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

Spent part of the afternoon yesterday surfing in search of some more top-notch running blogs a) because my blogroll looks anaemic and b) because good running blogs don’t grow on trees, it seems. Finding the right combination of ingredients is a challenge. The basic requirements are to find a runner who is initially bad at running (runners who’ve done 341 marathons in an assertive fashion are tedious – you have to have ODDS), who can write, who writes regularly, and whose last blog entry was not posted in 2001. The final and probably most important bit is to find a blogger who does not only blog about running, but throws in other observation and narrative at the same time. I found myself trawling through quite a few promising American blogs which included running (good), parenting (fine), eating habits (OK), equipment advice (useful), race reports (great) and – oh fuck – faith. In Darwin’s birthday week it is frightening enough to discover that only 14% of Americans believe in evolution, but it is instant blog death to know that when on the road these godjoggers are not listening to the sumptuous street stomp of Smooth Criminal, but instead to the godcasts of the Rev. Burt S Hugglebutter III of Screwball, Wyoming. No wonder they have taken up running. The bit they fail to mention is that they are being pursued by a baying mob wielding some peculiarly sturdy meat cleavers.

I spent an entirely different part of the afternoon looking at flight options to Boston in May. The options seem to be rather similar in that they all involve flying there and back in a fairly straight line. I only remark on this due to something I have noticed about parks. There is a definite ‘direction’ to all of them. Deptford Park, for instance, is an anti-clockwise park. It simply feels WRONG to run around it clockwise. Greenwich Park, on the other hand, is a clockwise park. I’ve even tried running my usual circuit anti-clockwise, but it just doesn’t work – like men in macs, three-year-olds with scissors, ABBA’s ‘Fernando’. The loop is flat and there seems to be no obvious reasons why the loop cannot be run in both directions, but it just can’t. It’s handy, however, that the Atlantic Ocean doesn’t seem to have this quality. Otherwise things could get awkward.

Alcohol

When you’re reading Bukowski, you don’t need actually to consume any alcohol yourself.

Running Progress

Rest day.