Category: The Athons

Janathon day eighteen: disappointed

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This morning I was been expecting to get up and venture out into a still and silent village hidden under a blanket of snow. Mentally, the blog was written – I would battle valiently against the elements to keep my Janathon honour in tact, ploughing out a token mile, I would return, heroic and be rewarded with a lovely pot of tea.

What I woke up to was a sparce covering of snow in the car park, a wet but snow-free main road and a wind-chill factor of -6oC Pfffffffff. This was a bitterly cold three-miler on weary legs. Looking on the brightside though:

  1. It is Friday
  2. I have Janathoned early so I can relax for the rest of the day and, more importantly, I don’t have to run for at least 24 hours
  3. No snow means that my weekend running options have increased immeasurably
  4. I was still given a lovely pot of tea

I was going to take a photo of an un-snowy road, but that would have been, well, just a road. However, as I was running back up the hill, my path was crossed by a splendid fox and this gives me an excuse to include this chap from the woolly archives.

From Lauren O'Farrell's Stitch London

From Lauren O’Farrell’s Stitch London

Janathon day seventeen: snowing

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It’s been one eye on the Met Office and the other on my Janathon ‘plan’ this week. On the proviso that the threatened snow wasn’t going to set in until Friday morning, I opted for a longish after-work pootle this evening and an early one for Friday morning.

Judging by some of the overheard conversations in our office, you would have thought that there is some kind of terrible apocalypse on the horizon rather than a brief flurry of the white stuff, but there we go. It had started as I set off from work and I used the drive home to consider my running kit of choice for the evening. I spotted four runners, two in long long tights and two in shorts. I decided to compromise on my knee-length tights (this was not the time to dust off my only-worn-once-in-Kent-where-I-am-a-stranger shorts), but also knew that unless I applied JogBlog’s 3G technique, I would never leave the sofa. Despite a brief threat of faffage, I was out of the door by six (with the grim realisation that I would be doing it all over again in twelve hours).

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I left the house with a strange spring in my step. The strange strange spring wore off after about a mile, I started to question my sanity and I ditched the plan of a long out and back. The falling snow was small and pointy as I started, but became fatter and more feathery around the two mile mark. I started to feel ok again and fell for the old chestnut of “ooh it’s not that windy” while the wind was behind me. This lasted until I turned around, started running into the wind and learned that even fat, feathery snow is bloody painful when it gets in your eye. Being lulled into a false sense of security put me three miles away from home, making a nice loop of six miles.

From the old days when I spent my working day photoshopping accessories onto animals instead of having a proper job

From the old days when I spent my working day photoshopping accessories onto animals instead of having a proper job

Flamingo - from a free Spud & Chloe pattern

Janathon day sixteen: motivation

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I was hoping to be able to blog some knitting today, but I realised that things had gone a little pear shaped and ended up spending most of last night (a) undoing my last few rounds and (b) defending my honour and integrity on twitter. Mostly (b).

Wednesday night is of course is yoga night, so it was an early Janathon run for me this morning. It was cold and dark outside and I wasn’t too keen on getting out there. Thanks to Heather for spurring me on from the (not cold and dark) Southern Hemisphere with the tweet:

This is what she learns at boot camp… http://notarunninggirl.wordpress.com/

I opted for a 3 mile out and back along a route that I haven’t yet run this year; not too slippy underfoot, I got to bellow “MORNING” at another runner and a dog walker, and it was warm enough to let my hands be visible at the end of my sleeves.

And although this isn’t the knitting that I was going to post, I’ve been wanting to show off this little fella who I knitted before Christmas.

Flamingo - from a free Spud & Chloe pattern

Flamingo – from a free Spud & Chloe pattern

Janathon day fifteen: Sooty

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Well I survived yesterday with the help of an emergency sandwich, which is somewhat better than the old days when I would rely on a post-beer refuelling of a bacon butty, roast chicken crisps, a mars bar and a can of full fat coke to see me return to action.

When I finished work at eight, I had to de-ice my car, the roads and pavements glittered with frost and I nearly fell on my arse several times whilst crossing the car park. There was a sense of inevitablility that I wouldn’t be getting out for a 6am run this morning. I didn’t even bother trying.

Today saw me get into a discussion with JogBlog debating the relative properties of fairy wands versus magician wands via the tangent of Sooty (I’ve storified the whole conversation here if you were lucky enough to miss it on twitter). This lead to the revelation that, not only had JogBlog gone to see The Sooty Show LIVE, but runningman856 had been backstage to shake Sooty by the paw.

Which reminded me of this rather wonderful (but slightly disturbing) song by Jay Foreman (who I saw supporting Dave Gorman last year).

And also Sooty and Sweep’s appearance on Radio Four’s Today programme, which was somewhat surreal when heard live on my way to work.

Tonight was a post-shopping 3 miler in the freezing cold.

 

Janathon day fourteen: beer

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I have been dreading this run since last Monday when we saw our mate and his mrs in Tesco and he invited us out for his birthday. He is very good (or very bad, depending on how you look at it) at leading people astray when it comes to pub and last night was no exception.

Just as you can map my drunken progress through the house by the trail of keys, handbag and shoes, I now have the power of technology to trace my steady decent from arriving at the club to when I apparently ‘fell off the kitchen’. I was (and still am) unbelievably chuffed with the price of a round (2 and a half pints of bitter, half a lager, pint of cider, 2 bottles of pils and a G&T – £14.26!), made arrangements for sharing JogBlog’s donkey with benjiboyW (if you look at his Janathon mileage, let me assure you that you’re not drunk or seeing things. It’s terrifying) and frittered away time and money on the quiz machine.

I did manage to have a savant-like run on one game, winning us a whole £3 with my tiny lady brain, but generally adopted a policy of poking at the screen with the confident certainty of the drunk. Things probably reached a low point when we were excited to survived a round of a game that asked us to identify “things that wobble” and then distinguish “letters of the alphabet” from an assortment of numbers and punctuation symbols.

Clearly some kind of miracle occurred overnight and I woke up before seven feeling remarkably chipper. We had to snow so I took myself down to the lodge to commune with nature and say hello to the ducks.

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I now have an insatiable hunger and have to go to work where the only available shop is the chemist in our building. I am doomed to a diet of chupa chup lollies and slimfast.

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