The weekend has started early in our house – how can you tell? I’ve had jam on my porridge. Usually weekdays have a scattering of sultanas, but at the weekends various forms of sugar come out of the cupboard – jam, syrup, honey, a spoonful of demerara sugar… From Twitter, it seems like a lot of Janathon is being fuelled by oaty goodness and the comments on the Guardian food blog proves that for every bowl of porridge there’s a different special technique or secret ingredient to ensure perfection. Apparently all my additions are sacrilegious to proper porridge and it’s fair to say that I’m unlikely to win the Golden Spurtle. However, looking at the recipes, it seems that the Speciality Section did include porridge kedgeree so maybe I’m onto something with kipper porridge.

Today’s run was a 2 mile out and back. I have realised that running down the big hill just to turn round and run back up the big hill is a particularly miserable route in the pre-dawn darkness. Daylight running tomorrow!

Day 14/31 –2 miles

Ferrero rochers burned

I must be getting used to the mornings as I spent the entire day with the nagging feeling that I’d forgotten to do something. Luckily (really?) I’m on an early one tomorrow so that we can have an evening of dvds and falafel. Instead, day 13 was a sociable three miles where we moaned about stuff, set the world to rights and ticked off another day of Janathon. According to the timber yard clock, it was a balmy 10.3C and I was far too warm in my jacket.

I appear to have run out of words tonight. Work continues to leave me feeling whacked at the end of the day and I find myself drifting off to the imaginary wool shop that I run in my head whenever things get bad. Being positive about it, the nightmare that I had on day 6 has just about reached a satisfactory conclusion, despite continuing to be a cursed at other points during the week. Also, it is almost Friday. This is a good thing.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed tomorrow (by normal service, I mean early morning rambling nonsense. Don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Day 13/31 –3  miles

Ferrero rochers burned

The gods are determined that I’m going to do morning Janathons. 03:49 I wake up to remember that I haven’t reset my alarm clock to Janathon time. Ridiculous.

06:00 up. 06:19 out of the door. 06:21 scare large man running with large dog and jumping over large puddle (he was surprisingly graceful) by wearing fluorescent yellow and chirping “MORNING!” at him. Run bizarre looping route for 2 miles, get wet through with drizzle, go home. That’s about it.

I thought I was doing well avoiding any major mishaps, but then I scaled my foot with porridge and dropped my omega-3 capsule into the bowl. I think I’m going to start having Cocopops on Janathon mornings.

Incidentally, I was wondering what supplements other people take? I know omega-3 is supposed to be good for joints (which is handy) but the woman in the health food shop recommended it to me for my psoriasis (which I treat with a combination of harsh chemicals and whimsy). I’ve never given much thought to taking anything else.

Day 12/31 –2 miles

Ferrero rochers burned

Today was one of those days where, if it wasn’t for Janathon, I would have done nothing. The plan was to run with my friend, but she wasn’t able to make it and I remembered that it was only polite to visit my sister’s Mr on his birthday. It would have been so easy to go visiting and then go home for tea.

However, Janathon duty calls and I found myself dressed like the Milk Tray man (black tights, black thermal top) but delivering a nice shiraz instead of over-sweet chocolates. Ginge shoved me out of the car at the top of the road and I ran home dressed like the Milk Tray man with an over zealous health and safety risk assessor (black tights, black thermal top, hi-vis bib).

It’s a route that takes me through the less salubrious end of town (having said that, every other unit in the town centre seems to be a pound shop, so I’m not sure that’s saying a great deal) and was mainly downhill until my nemesis hill on the way back into the village. Compare and contrast our running club leader’s idea of “mainly downhill” with my idea of “mainly downhill”.

 

Needless to say, this route helped me to go at a fairly decent lick. On the uphill into the village I heard an owl. It’s an appropriate place to hear an owl (next to the nature reserve, plenty of trees), but I started to doubt myself and wondered what if it’s not an owl, maybe it’s someone pretending to be an owl. With some kind of owl hoot apparatus. Maybe as a part of a pirate/smuggling escapade. It was probably just an owl.

Day 11/31 –3.1 miles

Ferrero rochers burned

When I ran early last week, I was relieved that I would only be doing early Janathon once a week. So why is it that a mere 5 days later, I’m up again for the first of 3 morning runs this week?

The main reason that I’m finding Janathon a lot harder than Juneathon is that there’s far more daylight in June than Jan. During last year’s Juneathon, 6/7 of the first week’s runs were done before 8.00 (setting off between 6:10 and 7:41), whereas it’s still dark at 8.00 at the moment. I’m enjoying my weekend daylight runs, but by the time that it’s light and I’ve faffed around prepared, run, faffed around, recovered, showered and changed, it feels like half the daylight hours have been lost. Add in the tweeting, blog  writing and (brilliant)  blog reading and it’s a wonder that Ginge is still speaking to me.

Which is why I find that I’m facing 3 early ones this week.

It is however, challenging. I’m quite a morning person, but have struggled a bit with the organisation of today. So far I have:

1. Spent ages trying to locate a bra in my room pile of clean washing. Then found 2 of them neatly folded on the top of one of the piles.
2. Put my Garmin out to get a signal nice and early… Only to turn it off while trying to put on the backlight. I didn’t manage to find the light and had to do some discrete hi-vis loitering on the street corner while it found a signal again.
3. Had some grapes with my breakfast porridge. Not a problem in itself, but I bit down on one of them only to find that it wasn’t actually a grape, rather I’d put my omega-3 capsule in my mouth which resulted in me  eating porridge with a hint of kippers
4. Put my car keys in my bum pocket and thought “I must remove those before these go in the wash”…

Given the above incidents, I’m pleased to confirm that this last one has been done. Have a good day Janathon  comrades!

Day 10/31 –2 miles

Ferrero rochers burned