Redefining my body

13/07/20116 Comments

Regular readers (hello both of you) will know that Wednesday night is yoga night and tonight was indeed that.

We spent most of the session doing quads work to build up to doing a bridge posture in three increasingly strong positions. I say three, it was actually four. The fourth version had us all gathered around our teacher, marvelling at how amazing the human body can be and returning to our mats with the intention of doing any version but that one. It was not to be. “You can manage that”, she said to me, “get two blocks and have a go…”. Unconvinced, I followed her instructions and up I went. My arms went a bit wobbly, so down I came. After a minute to recover, I went for it again… Up I went, no wobbles, strong arms, strong legs and very proud of myself.

Apparently I looked shocked. This had something to with the fact that I was shocked. My explanation for this was that I didn’t expect to be able to do it because I have pathetically weak arms. “No you don’t” she said, “you have strong arms. Redefine your arms!”.

Many of us run the risk of being defined by our own perceptions of ourselves – you know the sort of thing: I don’t do hills… I’m a slow runner… I’m not a racer… It’s only when someone challenges us (or we challenge ourselves) that we realise that we can be something else.

I am redefining my body every time I run.

Juneathon day 1: And so it begins…

01/06/201116 Comments

During previous Athons, I have stressed the importance of preparation for surviving them with some sanity intact, and so it was that I found myself up at midnight last night twiddling around with my blog and crashing around the sleeping form of Ginge while I tried to locate all the essentials for a 6 o’clock run the next morning. And then I couldn’t get to sleep. And then (as predicted) I woke up at 4.30 panicking that I’d slept through my alarm. I’ve actually spent the last few days with a sense of panic that I’ve forgotten to do Juneathon, so in some ways it was nice not to be a false alarm.

I was organised enough to set off at 5.55 and did a 3 mile there and back again through the village. Passed a man heading off to the mill pond to do a bit of fishing, another man walking 4 dogs and a runner with his hood pulled tight around his head like South Park Kenny (who didn’t say hello despite/because of me staring at him). Other than that, a very uneventful 3 miles .

During Janathon, I measured my runs in Ferrero Rocher (103.1 miles = 174 Ferrero Rocher). Despite what their marketing says, the Ferrero Rocher is a seasonal creature and has no place in Juneathon. After asking Twitter (thanks @adeleprince, @helsieboo and @abradypus), I am now very pleased to present the meter with the feature…. the scale that won’t fail…ladies and gentlemen…

Which is slightly more depressing than using Ferrero Rocher as you don’t get as many cornets to the mile.

(The Cornet-o-Meter uses calorie counts from Weight Loss Resources – an average cornet comes in at 140kcal and a 99 at 240kcal)

Review: Polaroid Venture sunglasses (finally…)

22/05/20115 Comments

This morning’s run was delayed for a bit as I peered out of the window and tried to decide whether I should trust the blue patches of the sky or be suspicious of the much larger areas of dark grey cloud. I erred on the side of caution and put my jacket on, only to spend some of my run squinting and wishing that I’d worn sunglasses (if only to protect my eyes from flying debris and flailing branches – it was incredibly windy out there). The run was largely uneventful; I did my good deed for the day by moving a branch out of the road, I saw some cows, said hello to two cyclists and spotted the very sad sight of a dead sheep in a field (if it was just resting, it definitely needs to find a more relaxed way of lying down). The last mile was done with gritted teeth and distraction techniques as the wind wore me down and I just wanted to get home.

One of the distractions was realising with horror that I’d still not posted a review of the sunglasses that I received ages ago (I’m sorry lovely Laura!), so here we go.

Monkey - as cool as...

There had been a bit of a mix up with the style of glasses and I had been sent these (modelled beautifully above by Monkey), which are lovely if you like that kind of thing, but a bit rubbish for running. After the swap had been arranged, I collected them from the nice men at Royal Mail and opened them up… My initial thought was, “Oooh, these are Ladies’ Glasses” because they were small and pink. I’ve since looked on the Polaroid website and discovered that they are actually red and feature on both the women’s and men’s sections (I assume that if they were actually pink, they would be called a manly word for pink. Like ‘steak’.)

The official photo

The first wear of them was actually driving home from the post office in the low afternoon sun (giving you some idea of how long I’ve had them) and the Polaroid lenses were excellent at reducing the glare and I felt a lot more comfortable with hurtling the car round some winding country lanes. Full marks for driving, but what about running?

The first time that I wore them to run in was on the Parbold to Burscough leg of my canal running (giving you a precise idea of how long I’ve had them…) and I have to admit that initially I wasn’t entirely convinced them. Although they were a comfy fit (they felt a bit smaller than the pair that I reviewed last year), I was able to see the bottom half of the frame, which I found a bit disconcerting, and they weren’t as light as my other pair. When we reached the half way bridge, we had a bit of a sit down and Ginge had a play with them. Being the brains of the operation, he realised that the arms are actually adjustable so you can change the angle at which they sit on your nose. Bingo! Loads more comfortable.

Canal reflected in lenses - artistic eh?

These suited the size of my head (relatively small, since you ask) and I think that they don’t make me look too ridiculous (it’s all I ask for these days, especially when running). Overall, there was no glare, no fogging (despite me sweating even more than usual) and the adjustable arms mean that if you push one arm up and one arm down, you can run and do Eric Morecambe impressions at the same time, which is a vastly underrated feature of sunglasses.

What I did on my holidays part one: New York running

15/05/20115 Comments

Basically, I am in love with New York. We’ve come back from a week’s holiday in the city and it was absolutely amazing in any number of ways – the touristy things, the energy, the wool, the creativity, the food, the running – rather than try to cram all of this into one epic post, I might witter across several. You lucky lucky people.

Seeing as this is supposed to be a running blog, I may as well start with the running. Before we set off, I had good intentions to use the hotel gym in an attempt to ward off the effects of the food mountain that inevitably would be consumed. I gave up on that plan before we even set off and just packed one lot of running kit and my trusty Garmin. In the event, I was either too busy or too asleep to even consider the treadmill. Although I spent 6 days not running, we spent 7 days doing a lot of walking. It’s a bit of a cliché that walking is the best way to see a city, but in this case it’s definitely true.

Things you see when you walk places

While we we ambled around, I mused on the runners that we saw and developed my usual city running jealousy. I’ve written before about this, but basically I see people running in cities and conjure up a fantasy life for myself where I too am a city runner. In this daydream I am a foot taller, two stone lighter, I bound like a gazelle and my glossy, swishy hair bounces with each not over-pronating step. I have an exciting career that gives me lunch break that isn’t half an hour of not dropping too much food into my keyboard (and I wouldn’t be the sort of woman who drops gravy down my front. Having said that, I probably wouldn’t be the sort of woman who eats gravy and that would be rubbish).

The High Line park - I would definitely run here if I lived in New York

Anyway, after a few days I was becoming a bit intimidated by all the alpha runners, especially as the female running kit of choice seemed to be bra top and tiny shorts (I’m certain that some of the tops were smaller than my actual sports bra). I was also having difficulty walking as the combination of walking miles, wearing too flat shoes, having gammy feet at the best of times and then doing all of the above in soaking wet shoes and socks had left me with blisters on blisters. Would I actually get to do my run in Central Park? Of course I bloody would, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Walking the Brooklyn Bridge after new shoes, plasters and foot cushioning had been purchased.

We eventually got round to it on the penultimate day, which was pretty much perfect – a sunny Sunday morning in the park. We caught the subway in our running kit, mooched across to the park and decided to head for a lap around the running track at the reservoir. The map we had bought warned us that there were rules about how to run legally around the park (clockwise, or possibly anticlockwise, on the inside, or possibly the outside, of the path) and this had made me a bit anxious that we would do something wrong and someone would shout at us (I live in fear of being shouted at by authoritative people). This is how we found ourselves setting off and following a perky lady who looked like she knew where she was going, unfortunately it turned out that she was going home and we were stalking her out of the park…. Back on track, we realised that there were lots of runners who were all doing their own thing and we headed up to the reservoir.

Reservoir complete with running track

I was reassured that there were a lot more normal runners out at the weekend, in fact there were runners of all shapes, sizes, ages and speeds. My favourite was a girl running wearing barefoot running shoes who was running with jazz hands and the same gait as a small girl riding an imaginary pony. It was fantastic being part of all these people doing the same thing, but differently and, for half an hour at least, pretend that I was part of this amazing city.

NYPD buggies - after not running for a week and eating food bigger than my head, I was very tempted to ask if I could borrow one instead of running back