Category: Running

Hello Dave, you are my wife now…

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I have been too busy getting on with (and enjoying) a week’s worth of exercise to actually write about it, so here goes with a quick recap. After a splendid weekend in London (where our food diary went something like; Mr Tickle jelly sweets, beer, piggy barmcake, beer, kangaroo burger, beer, beer, noodles, beer, noodles, beer, falafel, beer, pizza, beer, jaffa cakes) both Ginge and I felt that it was time for a week of temple food and committed exercise. I have been forced back into the gym to rediscover the fact that I quite like doing weights and I have discovered that necessity can be the mother of chilled out running…

Tuesday
I had planned to do a longish interval session, but couldn’t decide on what intervals to run. Because of my indecision, I ended up extending each running session by a minute and it turned into a longish pyramid interval session instead. Well it did for the first half… After a couple of miles or so I started to feel some lower abdominal pains, which never bodes well. Without going into too much detail, if this starts after a mile or so it’s usually a sign that I need to stop running away from home, turn round and make sure that I’m within dashing distance of a familiar loo. However, while I’ve been doing intervals and trying to pick up my speed, I’ve noticed that I get very similar pain when I start to run faster (I’m convinced it’s a combination of how I breathe and tense my upper body). The fun part is trying to tell which sort of pain it is.

I weighed up the fact that I was doing intervals against the fact that the weekend’s excesses had left my insides a bit confused and decided not to risk it. I turned round, abandoned the intervals and gently headed back. The pains didn’t stop. In fact they got worse. I walked for a bit. They got even worse. I had a growing sense of dread that I wasn’t going to make it home. I pulled up outside the slightly dodgy looking motel that I’ve gone past hundreds of times but never been in – they might have toilets near reception, I could just nip in couldn’t I? Deep breath, in I went – no loos. No signs of life. I followed the instructions for locating staff until I reached a door marked ‘Private’. Another deep breath. I tapped tentatively… Sounding like Hugh Grant* (“Um, excuse me, this is um very embarrassing, but I’m out running and ah, could I um, use your loo…?”) but feeling like Papa Lazarou (“Hello Dave, can I use your toilet Dave? Dave, there is a blockage in your toilet…” **). Luckily the lady was very nice, directed me to where I needed to be, I did what I needed to do and yelping “thank you very much” as I scuttled past the door marked ‘Private’.

The rest of the run was uneventful.

Wednesday
I went to the gym. I like the gym. They have proper facilities there.

Thursday
I fell asleep and declared it a rest day.

Friday
I took advantage of a late start at work to do an early but not too early 6 miles. The run itself was uneventful apart from the fact that it felt good, I enjoyed it and I managed to ignore the nagging voice of doubt that crept in after a couple of miles. Oh, and I ran without tunes. Normally I would have my shuffle on for anything more than three miles, but I couldn’t find my earphones and I was feeling reckless so off I went with only my thoughts for company. It turns out my thoughts are mostly weird and a large chunk of the run was taken up with thinking about advanced directives and what decisions I would want making if anything happened to me and I lost capacity. Cheerful. It did occur to me that it would be ironic if this was the run, without tunes and whilst thinking about such things, that I would get run over by a bus. Thankfully I wasn’t. I did see some swans though.

Saturday
Another self-declared rest day. I knitted.

Sunday
Long run day. I wasn’t sure if I was looking forward to this. On the one hand, I’d had some good runs during the week and was enjoying myself; on the other hand, what if I couldn’t do it? For once I’d put some thought into making sure that I was well prepared – a good carb-loaded tea the night before, only a small glass of wine, water before bed and when I got up, oats eaten an hour before setting off, water bottle filled. I had no route planned, other than turning right at the front door, left at the end of the road and then running 10 miles. After about half a mile, I realised that I had left my carefully filled water bottle on the kitchen table. Arse. I tried not to panic or give up and plodded on. This decided my route for me – rather than go a way that I find difficult at the best of times and has no escape routes, I went for a loop that could be 6.5 miles or it could be extended as much as I want. I plodded on, ignoring the dark grey clouds gathering to my left and listening to clever Radio 4 people talking amusingly about intellectually challenging things. Just over halfway, the heavens opened – I plodded on, actually quite grateful to be hydrating one way or another. At 6.5 miles, I plodded on with my extension loop, pausing at 8 miles to consider my route, before turning round and heading home, cold, wet and very pleased with myself.

The lesson of this story is that I seem to have an awful lot of comfort blankets in the form of routines when I run, some of them might be useful, but as long as I have me and my trainers I’m mostly ok.

And I hesitate to say this, but I think that I might have got my running mojo back!

*But not looking like him, unless he’s become a sweaty, red-raced blonde

**I hope that all of you familiar with the League of Gentleman are doing the voice. If you didn’t, go back and do the voice. Go on. You know you should.

Shiny new gadgetry in the sunshine

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Having spent my last week of Juneathon blogging from a tent using an iPhone that hovered on the edge of battery life from about 4 o’clock on the day we arrived, I could have done with having some kind of mobile charging device. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one then. However, it appears that mobile charging devices are a bit like buses and, all of a sudden, two have come along at once.

The nice people at Mobile Solar Chargers sent me two styles to try. Both of them can be charged by mains, solar and USB or can trickle charge (I’m learning the technical terms as I go along) your electrical gubbins purely from the sun.

My plan for testing these was to give them a full charge and discharge three times for the sake of the battery and then take one to work to test it on one of my staying late days. Unfortunately my natural level of disorganisation let me down. The first time I tried, I remembered my phone and the charger, but not the right adapter. The second time I tried, I remembered my charger and the right adapter, but forgot my actual phone (it was awful, I felt lost). Anyway, what followed was a much more haphazard approach to my trials.

The Lite mobile charger has a nifty light on a stalk and an LED indicator on the back to show how much charge it has. I tried to charge this on the window sill but after a full day, I couldn’t get it past 80% so I gave up and charged it with the plug. Since then, I haven’t really tried out the charging technology, but the light on a stalk has proved to be bloody brilliant for reading my Kindle in bed.

Lite charger – with nifty light on a stalk

The second charger is the Pocket mobile charger. This doesn’t have a light on a stalk but instinctively I prefer the look and feel of it. This is purely a shallow judgement because it looks sleeker and swishier than its Lite counterpart (which seems a bit boxy and clunky in comparison).

The swishy Pocket mobile charger

Again, I haven’t had the organisational skills to try it out using its stored charge, but did carry out the following selfless scientific research. If you want to replicate the experiment you will need:

  • A sunny Thursday (preferably a birthday)
  • A beer garden
  • Some lovely beer (to be truly accurate reconstruction, this should be a pint of Lancaster Straw)
  • Splendid company
  • An iPhone and a solar charger

First of all, fritter away a good amount of battery power by messing around on twitter and the internet.

Do not judge the prioritising of my apps. Just look at the lovely sheep.

Next, locate a suitable beer garden, purchase a pint of lovely beer and take up residence in the sunshine. Bask for a moment in the joy of being in a beer garden on a Thursday afternoon.
Whilst basking (there’s no point stopping just for the sake of science) plug charger into phone and wait.

After an hour or so, marvel that your phone is fully charged.

Oooh look! Charged! I had a very nice slow cooked pulled beef sandwich while this was doing its thing.

This bodes very well for future camping trips.

Oh, and another thing that I have been very impressed with is the sturdiness of the various adapters – I’ve had another charger in the past and that ended up with me having to use a pair of tweezers to remove half a mini-USB lead from some gadget or another.

Both the Lite (£24.95) and Pocket (£19.95) chargers are available from Mobile Solar Chargers (and I do intend to carry on with my haphazard experiments).

Nagging voices (real and imagined)

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The battle between head and legs has started. I have developed another mental block on long runs and the really annoying thing is that it’s kicking in after, ooooh, a couple of miles. A couple of miles! Ridiculous. To try to get past this (and because he’s managed to nearly lop off the top of one of his fingers and can’t do his normal gym/training stuff) Ginge joined me on an after work long run of 10ish miles.

The negative nagging head kicked in after an unbearably short while at which point Ginge looked disappointed and nagged encouraged me to stop being a slacker. This lasted until I next ground to a halt when he decided to introduce a penalty system where I would have to do an extra 0.1 mile for every time I stopped. Apparently this was a carrot and stick system where the stick was having to do the extra distance if I stopped running and the carrot was not having to do the extra distance if I didn’t stop running; I still feel that I’ve been duped on this one.  To be honest, I carried on being a bit rubbish and there were little walking breaks throughout the whole thing.

On the one hand I know that this is a perfectly acceptable way to approach longer distances and I know that they weren’t the best conditions for me. I had underfed myself (salad is not pre-run food) (although Ginge had eaten the same as me and he was fine) (but I’m soft), it was a lot warmer than I expected and I was somewhat distracted by an impending stressful work thing the next day. On the other hand, I know that these are just excuses and I can do this if I put my mind to it and start to ignore the negative little voice that lurks in the back.

By the end of the run (which ended up as 10.5 miles because of route mismanagement rather than punishment) I felt as if my knees had been put on backwards and my aching ankles (caused by traipsing around Manchester over the weekend) were grumbling even more. All of this makes me suspect that a new pair of trainers might be in order. I was hoping that my faithful New Balances and the cheeky new upstart Asics Kayanos (that have tried to replace the NBs in my affections) might survive until October and then I could treat myself to a shiny new pair post-Royal Parks. Now I’m not so sure. I think that there’s certainly enough time to break in a new pair before the start line and the idea of running on bouncy new soles is rather appealing, but this wasn’t part of the plan. I think I’ll give my Asics a run out and see how they go over a distance. Or maybe think of a new post-race treat…

Biscuits, Black Sheep and bicyclists

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My most recent Royal Parks Half newsletter was all about fuelling my training with good nutrition and hydration. The main point of this was to encourage us to buy lots of get used to drinking Lucozade Sport before the big day and I preferred today’s experiential learning entitled “what not to do”.

I warmed up by preparing to bake a batch of not-quite-ANZAC biscuits, which I suspect don’t have quite the nutritional value that I should be aiming for. It was probably a good thing that I couldn’t finish making these before I went out (a lack of dessiciated coconut in the baking cupboard) otherwise I might have replaced ‘running’ with ‘scoffing’ as my morning’s activity.

To clarify, occasionally I do bake something that isn’t make of butter, oats and syrup. Occasionally.

What today taught me is that a pre-hydration session on the Black Sheep whilst watching the rugby is ill-thought out preparation for a long run. To force myself out of the door today, I’d left my car at mum’s and planned an indirect route that I could round up to make 8 miles (rather than the 5.5 miles it usually measures). With hindsight, I should have stuck to the shorter version because I was flagging by mile 5 and run-walking half a mile later. With hindsight I probably shouldn’t have chosen the day before a long run to do my first weights session back at the gym and with hindsight my mileage this weekend has been pathetic so this was never going to be a roaring success.

Ah well, despite all this I quite enjoyed myself. Since the end of June, I’ve been running without music on my short runs, but can’t even contemplate a long run without something to distract me a little. Rather than tunes, I like using the longer runs to listen to the spoken word and am indulging in the wonderful Desert Island Discs archive (today was David Tennant and John Bishop) as well as trying to boost my IQ with the Infinite Monkey Cage and More or Less podcasts. As well as the pleasure of basking in the dulcet tones of Mr Tennant (no offence to John Bishop), I spied quite a lot of cyclists (including a team taking a break on their way from John O’Groats to Lands End) which put a smile on my face because next week the same route will be taken up by the awesome athleticism of Ironman UK competitors completing their 113 mile bike course. I must make it out to peer at them this year.

Wrap Up and Run

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I feel that there been a lovely symmetry to this week. On Friday, I finished a spectacular piece of knitting, namely my Scarf of Doom. The Scarf of Doom is the work of graffiti knitter Deadly Knitshade who was invited onto BBC Breakfast to talk about knitting a few weeks ago. She was asked to knit a bright, chunky scarf while she talked, which she did, only for elements of the online knitting community to be hypercritical of, well, pretty much every aspect of her telly appearance. Her response was one of the most graceful, humorous and quite frankly bloody marvellous things that I’ve ever read (you can read the full story here, please do – my summary doesn’t do it justice).

Knitted with two strands of double-knit on 15mm needles. The wool is from my stash (from the top it was bought for a tea cosy, the same tea cosy, pizza bases, various vegetables, flower petals and beaks, grapes/aubergine)

As someone who responds to the question “So what kind of things do you knit?” with some slightly embarrassed foot shuffling and “Um. Dinosaurs. And um, chickens. And peas. And tiny hats. And stuff….”, I was liberated by Deadly Knitshade’s definition of ‘squeeeee knitting’ (it might be made out of scratchy, fluorescent acrylic yarn, but people look at it, want it and go ‘squeeeeee’). In the spirit of solidarity, it seemed only fitting that I should knit a Scarf of Doom. Also, Deadly Knitshade promised a medal for those who made one. As Ginge will testify, I have a Muttley-like love of medals and the lure of something shiny is all that I need to motivate me for a lot of things.

Monkey's disappointment at not getting another medal was soothed by his new scarf.

Sadly there was no medal on offer on Sunday’s Wrap Up and Run 10K in Southport. This was organised by Age UK to raise awareness and funds to help keep older people warm during the winter months. I entered on a whim this Wednesday, when the weather was balmy and spring-like and I couldn’t help but think that maybe Age UK’s campaign was a little mistimed. Ha. The Met Office promised heavy or light rain and temperatures of around 5˚C (which would feel like 1˚C). When we arrived in Southport, there was a bitter wind that chilled the steady drizzle and resulted in me looking spectacularly grumpy (there is photographic evidence of this. I won’t be sharing it with you).

I was cold enough to consider joining in with the warm up. At my only previous race where there has been a pre-race warm up (Liverpool Women’s 10K) I avoided it because it looked like it required far too much coordination for my paltry skills. Today I muttered darkly about not being here to jump up and down, I like running and if I wanted to do jumping, I would go to…jumping practise (I said I was grumpy). My grudging participation was rewarded by the friendliest, most laid back, random warm up (given that the chap who did it didn’t look like the ‘Camilla’ who had previously been introduced, I suspect he was a last minute replacement) that ended up with him accepting heckled exercise suggestions from the crowd.

The only downside of the warm up was that I landed slightly awkwardly when we were jumping (typical, it turns out that I need that jumping practise after all) and twanged my ankle. As I lined up at the start, I tried to ignore the fact that it felt like a slight sprain (twelve hours later, I had a dull ache and some slight swelling in my right ankle) and concentrated on the task in hand. I haven’t been following a training plan, in fact my running has been a little erratic of late, so I was intrigued to see how I would get on in my pursuit of a sub-60 10K.

Setting off, I was very,very cold. My feet were numb, my hands were freezing. As we ran along the coastal path into the wind, I really started to doubt my sanity. For those of you who don’t know Southport, it is extremely flat and there is a dearth of tropical palm trees to act as a windbreak from the breezes off the Irish Sea. If I’m honest, there’s a lack of anything to act as a windbreak. If I’m completely honest, there’s usually a lack of sea as well. Anyway, I abandoned being able to consult Miles in favour of pulling my sleeves down over my hands in a pathetic attempt to retain some heat. This led to a breakdown in communication between me and Miles as I managed to press his stop button and didn’t realise for what turned out to be about half a mile (when I realised that I had been running 0.69 miles for ages).

I can only apologise to the poor woman with the lovely knitted ear-warmer who I sidled up to and stalked for a bit so that I could get a proper look. And also the very tall man who ran with his feet turned out and I followed because he looked like a hi-vis emperor penguin. Apart from the soul destroying part at 3K where you could see the marker for 4K just to your right, but had to run around the boating lake to get to, the KMs seemed to pass fairly quickly. I felt strong and comfortable and we didn’t always have to run into the wind. At 8K, I ended up grinning like an idiot at the sight and sound of the drummers who welcomed the runners into the home stretch. My legs, trained to keep my feet to the beat with AudioFuel, took on a life of their own and my pace ramped up to 8.34min/mile as I bounced cheerily past them.

The finish line in sight, I managed a bit of a sprint at the end, collected my water, t-shirt and mars bar, was reunited with a well wrapped up Ginge and risked charges of indecent exposure as I changed tops in the car park. I was very pleased to get cosy with my woolly hat, a flask of tea and my Scarf of Doom and within minutes of arriving home, I’d had a text to confirm my chip time as 1.00.31. All in all, it was a rather good morning.

UPDATE: I forgot to credit Ginge with the Southport photography. He definitely manage to capture the bleakness of the day. Though he didn’t manage to capture me flicking the Vs at him during the bouncy warm up.

Throughout March, there are some more Wrap Up and Run races coming up in Coventry, Exeter, Cheshire and Yorkshire – if Southport is anything to go by, I would heartily recommend them no matter what your running experience.