Category: Running

Juneathon day eight: Fun in the sun

2 Comments

I’ve always liked a morning run. The reasons are multiple: it gets it out of the way, mornings are lovely and full of promise, it’s quiet and if it’s sunny, then it’s not too warm. I was woken up unfeasibly early and by 6.00 I was sitting with a cup of tea and a backlog of Juneathon blogs, supervising a small boy intent on crawling his way to every possible danger in the front room.

When I was able to hand over the supervisory reins to Ginge, I bounded out of the door like an excited labrador. Now, technically the C2K plan had me back doing a sequence of run 5, walk 3, run 8, walk 3, run 5, but what is the point of a plan if you can’t ignore it? I decided just to run and see how I got on.

How I got on was twenty minutes running, interrupted at 12min30 for an utterly pointless thirty seconds walk. It was the sun wot done it. I was plodding along into the sun when I made the mistake of remembering how I hard I find it to run in the warmer weather. Before I knew it, I had convinced myself that I needed to have a little break. Hmmmm. After that, I carried on plodding home and when I got there, realised that it felt harder than last time because I was going faster than the last time.

Juneathon day six: mind over matter

8 Comments

I picked that title because it suggests an air of grit and determination. In fact, if you were a fly on our wall what you would have seen was stubborn, pig-headed, mardy foot stamping and self-doubt.

It’s been brewing for a week, ever since I saw that I had to go from eight minutes running to twenty minutes running. The doubt had crept in. In fact, not only had the doubt had crept in, but the tiredness had come too and brought irrational thinking along for the ride. It took me over an hour and a half to get out for tonight’s run. It was too soon after tea. The baby will wake up. My back hurts. It’s too late. It’s too dark.

The excuses became more and more ridiculous until I admitted to Ginge that it was simply that I can’t do it. The conversation turned a bit Keith Harris and Orville – “I wish I could fly, right up to the sky” “you can”, “I can’t”, “you can”. I was only marginally less irritating than that duck and the daft thing was, I actually wanted to go.

Off I went. I knew vaguely where eight minutes running would take me, so I didn’t check my watch until I was well past there. Miles (my Garmin) told me I’d done 0.86 miles. I decided that I could claim at least one literal milestone of my return and do my first full mile.

I RAN FOR A MILE!

After a little celebratory dance, I plodded on a bit and then turned back. At 12 minutes, I thought to myself “well I know I can do eight minutes”. I plodded on. Before I knew it, I’d done 15 minutes and I knew I could do 5 minutes. I kept picking off the landmarks and concentrated on breathing (it was quite an effort by this point) until the clock hit 20 and I hit the stop button with a sigh of relief.

All in all I covered 1.86 miles in 20 minutes. I will win no prizes for speed, but that’s not one, but two milestones tonight. I returned home (as Ginge predicted) with a smile on my face. He despairs of me sometimes.

Juneathon day one – couch to 5k week 5 day 2

3 Comments

Even though I started this year’s Janathon, it was only a couple of months after having Mini-Ginge, I was still banned from doing any high impact exercise and I felt I had a decent excuse for taking it easy. He is now nearly eight months old and I’m slowly but surely getting back to running. I feel that I should make a proper go of Juneathon. I thought that I’d considered all the issues that would make this year more challenging; the tiredness, the wonky pelvic floor, the difficulty getting out for early morning runs, the dodgy hip and back, the potentially still lax ligaments, the tiredness… What I didn’t account for was that even leaving the house would take so flipping long.

With hindsight, it might have been my own fault, but before I left I decided to peek in on Mini-Ginge just to make sure that he was settled in his cot. As I looked in the room, a head popped up and a pair eyes stared out at me in the gloom. His gaze met mine. I tried to back away, but it was too late. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

A few cuddles and a couple of verses of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star later and I thought it was safe to leave. I stood up. His face crumpled. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

At this point I handed over to Ginge but the WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHs continued, punctuated with a few of his hungry cries. This was a situation that I was hoping to avoid because once my sports bra is on, the door to the buffet is firmly locked. If wearing a nursing bra is like nipping to the cash machine when you need a tenner, wearing a sports bra is like getting your tenner from deep in the vaults of the Bank of England*.

I left the boy blowing raspberries in his cot and legged it.

Today’s legging it consisted of 8 minutes running, 5 minutes running, 8 minutes running. This was the first time that the return leg would see me running all the way home and it was both liberating and frustrating not looking at my watch to see how many minutes I had left. Instead I kept on picking out landmarks in the distance to split up the distance until I was home.

My next session sees me leap up from 8 minutes to 20 minutes of running. I have no idea who was doing the maths for this one, but clearly they forgot about all of the possible numbers between 8 and 20. I am a little terrified.

*I originally wrote Fort Knox, which does read better but then the pedant in me realised that you’d really struggle to get a tenner from there.

Things I have learned (or remembered) since returning to the gym

4 Comments

1. I still get very very red faced, very very sweaty and quite a lot stinky.
I look dreadful after I’ve been running, it’s as if someone swaps my head for a big, red, shiny grinning tomato. I really don’t care about this, although the other day Mini-Ginge was very reluctant to have hugs with me because I smelled so hideous. I have probably scarred him for life.

2. I’m still not down with the music videos
Yup, it’s still lots of ladies writhing around in their bra and pants. To be honest, if I wanted to have a close up view of that many gussets, I’d work for M&S quality control. Having said that, today’s telly was “Coldplay: The Collection” and seemed to involve Chris Martin learning puppetry with a spoon.

3. I’m rubbish at following plans
I’m (loosely) following the NHS Couch to 5K plan. I did week one twice, week two once and today decided to wing it with week three. I suspect that this is not the way that the creators intended it to be done.

4. I don’t get the concept of Weetabix as a drink, it does not sit comfortably with me
I wasn’t actually at the gym when this occurred to me (I was in Tesco) and found myself doing a “bleurgh” face every time they invaded my consciousness. I just needed to get this off my chest.

5. I am still rubbish at holding numbers in my head
I look at the plan, I forget what I’m supposed to run, I look at the plan again, I set off running, I look at the clock, I run, I look at the clock – it says 6 minutes 39 seconds, I try to remember whether I should be running to 8 minutes or 8 minutes 30 seconds, I tell myself that I have only been running 30 seconds, it seems longer, I forget how long I’m supposed to be running for. Repeat for twenty minutes.

6. I want to be good at this again
One of my many books about avoiding procrastination (I know, I know…) discusses goal setting and points out that it’s one thing to want to be able to do something, it’s quite another to want to go through the process to get there. The example it gives is learning Italian; the author realised that while she loves the idea of being able to speak Italian, ordering rustic pasta, flirting with waiters and zipping round on a Vespa, she is less keen on the actual sitting down and learning verbs, nouns and adjectives. Similarly, I want to be bounding effortlessly down the road, not doing the boring hard work of increasing a minute at a time.

7. I am never going to be one of those people who chat to instructors
I gibber. And then run away. I just can’t do it.

8. The lightest kettlebells are pink
Why is this? It does not affect my life as I steer well clear of them, but they are are on shelf next to me and it grates a little.

9. I could do with throwing in some abdominal work
Core stability, blah blah blah…

10. I enjoy myself when I get there
I just have to get my lazy arse out of the door.

 

Life with a tiny dictator

11 Comments

Well that was left as a bit of a cliffhanger wasn’t it? Five days until due date and then no word for nine weeks… First of all you can rest assured that I’m not some kind of medical miracle and I haven’t gone nine weeks overdue. I was grumpy enough at five days over and would more than likely have killed someone by now if I was still full of baby.

To cut a long story short and avoid going into too much detail (when you’re pregnant, the simple question “how are you?” elicits a Pavlovian response to hand over a pot of wee and start discussing your, as the daytime telly adverts put it, ‘intimate area’), I had a little ‘encouragement’ from the midwife on Friday morning and labour started that afternoon. I did however, remain in denial about this (convinced that my contractions were Braxton Hicks) until the evening when Ginge pretty much gave me an ultimatum to ring the midwives or else. Eventually I did ring the midwives and (after a warm bath, some paracetamol and a TENS machine) was admitted an hour later.

The birth itself didn’t exactly go according to plan, but I assume that very few people’s plans end up with a set of forceps being wielded by a gentleman that your mum would later refer to as “Doctor Big Hands”… Personally I was well away on the gas and air, so it all flew by for me and it was poor Ginge and my mum who suffered (their hands are still recovering from the Incredible Hulk-like squeezes I gave them).

So from that initial phone call at 7.30pm on Friday, via a birthing pool, a blue-lit ambulance up the M6 (at the slightest hint of risk they transfer from the midwife-led unit to the delivery suite at another hospital), a midwife who broke half the the room, Dr Big Hands, another more fabulous less cack-handed midwife and her student, and Ginge cutting the cord, at 8.34 on Saturday 12th October we became very proud parents to a 6lb 11oz baby boy.

Hal (or as he will be referred to on here, Mini Ginge) is a lovely little chap who is very laid back as long as the milky buffet isn’t too far away. However, although he is only tiny, he completely rules the roost (and quite rightly so).

20131217-213118.jpg
One of the reasons for my lack of posts is that I was planning to write about his arrival and then at week six, document my triumphant return to running. Unfortunately at week 6 I was being advised by both my GP and my physio that high-impact exercise shouldn’t feature in my life for at least 3-6 months. I shall explain more about this when I have decided how much information is too much information…