Tag: Running

Juneathon day 8: I need putting in a bag and shaking

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Ginge marvels at my ability to wake up in a foul mood. Nothing actually happens in those brief moments between dreaming and waking, but somehow the clouds have rolled in and everything is a bit grey and bleak. There’s always a temptation to let it swallow me up (inevitably leading to more clouds later on, when I turn this into another stick to beat myself with) rather than kick myself up the bum and shout “RAAAAHHHH!” at it. This morning was one of those mornings. I forgot to set my alarm, but still woke up at half five – rather than cheer the fact that I’d woken up in plenty of time, I uttered the words “sod Juneathon” (or words to that effect…). Half an hour later, I still hadn’t shifted and was skirting dangerously close to letting myself passively fail by ‘running out of time’.

Five minutes after that, I was dressed (albeit with my running tights on inside out, but I looked fairly respectable) and being hustled out of the door to go and do my Audiofuel intervals. The cloud lurked for about three minutes before I started to feel better. I belted out my fast bits quicker than last week (my training conversation with Ginge last night went: Ginge “the key to sprinting is using your arms – pump your arms and your legs will go faster”, Me “yes, but I’ll look like a tit….”) and ignored the cloud creeping back in when I nearly decided that having a short walk as part of one of my recoveries was a sign of my abject failure.

Who knows what set me off this morning. It could be that I’ve got some work worries in the back of my mind, it could be something abstract that hasn’t occurred to me yet, it could just have been that I was really hungry when I woke up….

I really can’t be doing with my head sometimes.

Today was exactly half way between a 99 or 2 cornets – maybe a 99 with sauce and sprinkles.

Juneathon day 7: Bleary

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Tuesday night is the night that Ginge and I tend to run together. Today we had planned to meet up after work so that we could fill in some of my missing canal running around Wigan. Then we thought about it for a bit and decided that it would be so much better to have a night that involves no jogging, blogging or logging, but does involve watching Saturday’s Dr Who and drinking copious amounts of tea.

Annoyingly, my pre-alarm call Juneathon-panic waking up happened at the record time of 2.50 something this morning, which combined with the fact that I’d had trouble getting to sleep, meant that when the real alarm went off at half five, I could swear that someone had glued my eyelids shut overnight.

Eyes prised open, appropriate kit located, water drunk, out I go looking more than a bit startled – a mere 10 hours and three minutes since I had set off on my last Juneathon run. After doing a long run on Sunday and a fast run yesterday, I decided that today should be a rest day and I would just do two miles. Normally, when I have to do a short run, I try to do something useful with it (intervals, hills, just belting through) but today that idea was dismissed as nonsense. Instead, I chose to run a shortened version of a standard there and back, with the added excitement of doing it backwards in part (the route, not my running style – that would definitely have ended in tears) with the result that briefly I became trapped in a cul-de-sac because it all looked different from the other direction. The Garmin was checked for only distance, not pace and I was home to see a rainbow arching across the dark grey clouds before the rain came splatting down.

Juneathon Day 6: Blimey Charlie!

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Garmin, check. Shuffle, check. Clubcard, check. Monday night is big shop night in the Hopefully household and earlier Athons have taught me that the most effective use of time is to run home from Tesco (well I’m hardly going to get up at half five on a Monday morning am I?). I have long since run out of shame when it comes to going to supermarkets in my running kit (at least tonight I was there pre-run so I wasn’t red-faced, sweaty or muddy, which is a blessing for everyone) and I think more people (me included) were distracted by the sight of a woman who appeared to be wearing a pelmet as a skirt.

To get home, I have a choice of two routes. Both are three miles long. One is an undulating bypass between an industrial estate and a housing estate finishing with my old nemesis hill. The other is mainly flat and runs between fields full of sheep. Guess which one I picked? I know, I know, but don’t judge me just yet…

Yesterday on Twitter, JogBlog was extolling the virtues of owning a Garmin to Hels and the conversation turned to the fact that some let you run against a virtual training buddy (JogBlog’s is named Cedric). This lead to some discussion about training plans which reminded me that I should really get on with some proper training if I’m supposed to be running the Folkestone half in September and Cathy suggested I use a virtual partner. Instead, I used my actual partner (the ever reliable Ginge) to kick my arse as we ran along the canal – the result was that I managed to finish with an average pace of 10.03min/mile over 8 miles (the last 2 half mile splits came in at 9.35 and 9.24 – I have no idea how) and I never do that.

Ginge presented me with undeniable evidence that it’s my head that’s holding me back  from improving at the moment – when he told me that he’d deliberately gone a bit faster than normal, I checked my pace, fear set in and I immediately slowed down.

Unfortuately (and fortunately, I’m not an idiot) now that this particular Pandora’s box has been opened, the fact that I can go faster is fluttering out there like a malevolent moth. I can’t really keep slacking by running at my familiar pace, however comforting that is. And so it was with some trepidation that I pressed buttons randomly on my Garmin until I had managed to challenge it to a race at a 9.30min/mile pace all the way home from Tesco. The result?

It was a bit of a drubbing for the Garmin – I beat it with a minute to spare. Ha. Take that as-yet-unamed-GPS-watch-thingy.

Annoyingly, this doesn’t really affect my cornet count and I now have a higher benchmark than I expected. Arse.

 

Juneathon Day 5: Canal Adventure #9 – Burscough Bridge to Halsall

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For starters, this Juneathon episode has me slightly twitchy because I have a standard format for my Juneathon post titles and a standard format for my canal running post titles. Today I have had to combine the two and I’m not convinced that it works as a title. Clunkiness aside, today was a good day. I had been out for lunch with my running friend (feeling slightly weird that I wasn’t wearing any kind of lycra or wicking fabrics) and had fuelled up on quiche (we both stared longingly at the pudding menu but resisted temptation) before going home and collecting Ginge for a drive out into the countryside and a spot of canal running.

We’ve been concentrating on going out eastwards towards Yorkshire, but we’re past day trips for that side now (we’ve got a few canal camping trips planned to get those done) so it’s back to West Lancashire to pick up where we left off in the sunshine at Bridge 28. Today was much more of a grey day, though it had stopped raining by the time we set off.

Bridge 28 - the start

The pub that we parked in had this in the beer garden. I think that it’s some kind of children’s plaything, possibly that’s been retrieved from a Communist state during the Cold War.

It's fun kids. No, really, it is.

Just yards after setting off, I pulled off one of my sudden stops that normally cause Ginge to nearly fall in the canal – it was well worth it to tiptoe past these sleeping ducks.

Sleepy ducks

The ducks were rapidly followed up by these chaps – nearly but not quite grown up coots (the waterfowl theme continues later in an oh so cute kind of way).

Teenage coots

As we were doing a there and back run, I didn’t take many photos on the way out and it gave us chance to get a nice pace going (stopping to take photos doesn’t help in getting into a rhythm) and soon enough we were at the halfway point (after a mild bit of heckling from a group of lads in a beer garden, who then thanked us politely as we stood to one side to let them pass on their bikes a few minutes later. Pah.

Bridge 21A - the turnaround point

There were lots of moorings along this stretch, but I think these were the two most interesting. Thor and The Pride of Sefton, the latter is is a barge converted to make the canal accessible for people with disabilities.

Thor

The Pride of Sefton

This area is still very agricultural and there probably hasn’t been that many changes over the years. For canal runners, the best thing about this is that there are few new bridges (and so there are few annoying As, Bs or anything elses between the round numbers), this combined with their even spacing and the canal’s straight route meant that the miles ticked quickly by.

The nicest bridge of the run

We passed this plaque marking the place where the building of the Leeds & Liverpool canal formally began and this is marked with an information board and sculpture just after.

Marking a little bit of history

Scupture

After we’d stopped to take a photo of this bird house…

A room with a view

…Ginge spotted these little lovelies – aren’t they cute?

All together now...Awwwwwwww.

And I realised just how close we are to the Liverpool end of this escapade.

Gulp.

Miles run = 8
Canal miles completed = 4
Total canal miles = 62.6/127*
Bridges = 28 to 21A

*So very nearly halfway!
 

Juneathon Day 4: Good morning!

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Last night I decided that I wouldn’t set an alarm, but whenever I woke up, I would get up and run. I woke up at 4.30. So I went back to sleep. When I woke up at a more reasonable time I managed a good 45 minutes of procrastination and planning before setting off. The problem was that my run didn’t have a shape or a soundtrack – Should I run far or near? Left or right? Loop or there and back? Tunes or words or Audiofuel or nothing? When did it all get this complicated?

In the end, I assembled sunglasses, shuffle, Garmin and self and set off down to the lodge for what is a standard but lovely route. It’s a mile there and back along the main road and a mile down a side road and round the lodge. I always listen to tunes on the boring bits, but then take out my earphones when I reach the lodge so I can hear the birds and bask in the loveliness of it all.

I didn’t really see anyone on the way down, but at 8 o’clock on a sunny Saturday morning, the park was busy with dog walkers and I got to do lots of one of my favourite things – saying a cheerful “Good morning!” to anyone and everyone. I’m generally happy when I run (although Ginge would dispute this when I’m having one of my “can you run back to the car and pick me up….?” runs) and like to share my sweaty happiness with the unsuspecting passers-by.

All told, I said hello to a grand total of 13 people. The only people who I didn’t say hello to were a woman was explaining to her young daughter why she couldn’t go in the water, a chap who was explaining to his terrier why he couldn’t go in the water and a man who was quite scary looking and was staring so determinedly at the ground that I didn’t want to interrupt his focus…

The lodge itself

More fluffy wildfowl

Sleepy ducks

On the way back home, I have to run up what was once my nemesis hill (I now run up and down it for fun. Well I attempted some hill training on it. Once). It’s about half a mile of hill and does sometimes seem to be endless. As I set off, I spotted a woman who I’d seen running around the lodge. She was wearing teeny shorts and looked every inch the ‘proper runner’. And then she walked. I carried on with my steady plod, she ran a bit, walked, ran a bit, I carried on, catching her up and eventually overtaking her. There was a definite hint of smugness about me as I reached the top (I’m a bad person) – I wasn’t judging her running abilities, for all I know she might have been injured, hungover, doing intervals (although the walking bits did have an air of fed up and knackered about them), or had all sorts of reasons. What pleased me was that the hill makes me realise how much my running has improved and I’m proud that my wobbly bottom powered legs can get me up the damn thing.