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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Janathon day thirteen: frosty

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A cold and frosty morning required the incentive of breakfast to get me out on today’s run, which turned into a seven miler with Ginge.

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We abandoned the planned route in favour of a run of unknown length that took us through the fields that we had splashed through last weekend.

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Today they were a bit crunchier under foot (with the exception of several incidents where my heavy footedness took me through the ice accompanied by shrieks of “FREEZING MUD!!!”).

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The fields run alongside the M6, which gave the odd sensation of running along the hard shoulder (which I often think would be a brilliant thing to be able to do – although clearly illegal and stupid, so don’t go getting ideas).

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I got into a bit of a staring contest with these woolly lovelies. They won.

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My legs took a bit of time to find some kind of stride (but continued to complain bitterly) and weren’t happy to be reminded of the gentle but long and gruelling incline that I normally run the opposite way.

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We did see this al fresco ice bath, but I decided that it was neither the time nor the place to start experimenting with that kind of recovery programme…

SAM_2094All in all it was a fairly steady plod, although when I consulted Miles I was impressed to see that the final half mile was run a minute/mile faster than the rest – it’s amazing the effect that the promise of a sausage barmcake can have on my legs!

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Janathon day twelve: parkrun

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Forget the Bermuda triangle, forget the rhubarb triangle, I live in the middle of a parkrun triangle. You would have thought that means that I’m a regular Saturday morning parkrunner wouldn’t you? Well no. I have done three, two of which were during Athons and the third being to meet up with abradyus, an Athoner and parkrun tourist extraordinaire.

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I always think of Pennington as being my ‘home’ parkrun (because I have been twice and it’s near where I work so I can navigate there without thinking, whereas I always get lost in Bolton). Twitter had told me that as usual all of the cool kids were running a parkrun this morning, so it seemed a good a time as any to add on the third point of my triangle – Preston; Avenham Park to be precise. Preston also fitted nicely with our plans for the day, so poor Ginge was forced out of bed at an unreasonable hour in order to act as driver and photographer. Sorry Ginge.

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All of the three local parkruns involve a hill of some sort – Preston’s is a short, steep one at the start of each lap, the course then meanders downhill, under the railway, tantalisingly close to a pub with very good beer and alongside the River Ribble (across which blew a chilly wind) – repeat x 3. Or as I described it to JogBlog (who, along with I Like to Count, has lost her parkrun virginity at Whitstable this morning) “Mine was flat STEEP HILL gentle downhill flat flat STEEP HILL gentle downhill flat flat STEEP HILL gentle downhill flat”.

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Hill – my elbow to left of shot

Despite the hill, I really enjoyed it and Pennington now has a fierce competitor for my annual affections.

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Janathon day eleven: damp

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Conversations that you really shouldn’t be having before six in the morning (from under the duvet):

“…what’s it doing out there? Is it wet? It sounds wet…”

Having been told that it was “just residual”, I got up, got dressed and left Miles in the garden to get a signal. And then I heard it. Rain. Steady and drumming on the porch roof. Realising I couldn’t leave Miles exposed in the elements and that I would have to at least go out to rescue him, I threw on my hi-vis and set off before I could change my mind.

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After that, things were boringly uneventful. I saw not a single soul, the rain slowed to a gentle drizzle, my legs complained a bit and that was that.

In other news – Janathon t-shirts (and other exciting merchandise – dog t-shirt anyone?) are now available from CafePress and can be seen on the Janathon facebook page modelled by the Queen of the Athons herself.

Oh, and if you haven’t got enough blog reading going on in January, have a nosy at Not a Running Girl where H, inspired by all the Janathon posts, is blogging her adventures in boot camp for the next six weeks. Do not be confused by all her talk of this thing called ‘summer’; she is not delirious from the rain, just in the Southern Hemisphere.

Janathon day ten: stretched

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Regular readers may remember that Wednesday night is yoga night. I’ve never used yoga as an Athon activity because it feels like cheating seeing as I normally do it anyway (having said that, it’s nice to have in the bag for an emergency) but recently I’ve had to have a few months off because work was getting in the way of life again.

I would love to pass myself off as a swishy-haired, glossy looking, serene yoga bunny, but too many people have met me for me to be able to get away with that. Wednesday nights currently see me in emergency yoga kit (an old pair of running tights and a Carter USM t-shirt) after I discovered (five minutes before going back to my first class, of course) that my usual leggings had thinned somewhat and my downward facing dog was showing off a clear outline of Marks and Sparks’ finest…

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There were two weeks back on the mat before Christmas and last night was the first session after a two-week festive break.  I was hoping for a chance to give my poor Janathon-worn legs a lovely relaxing stretch. Fat chance. Our teacher went back to basics with form and posture and what I actually got was a really good strong leg session; I have spent today increasingly feeling like someone has set about my thighs with a lump hammer.

When I was putting on my warm layers for our nap at the end relaxation, I realised that running every day during Janathon is taking its toll. Nothing to do with sore limbs, merely the fact that I checked my socks for L and R as I put them on…

Anyway, that was yesterday. Today’s run had the promise of company, only for vanity to snatch that promise away (Ginge forgot that he was off to have his hair cut). My routes around the village are wearing a bit thin so we came up with an idea to vary things a little. A bit like the shop and drop of the other night, this time Ginge drove off into town while I ran after him (I couldn’t keep up) – in competition with JogBlog’s punning today, he has christened this a ‘Cass and carry’.