Matt Gets Running

This morn­ing has been a morn­ing of water. I have a lot to do today. After I woke up, had break­fast and had a shower, I looked out of the window.

Onto dreary grey drizzle. Meh. But, look­ing at the weather fore­cast and the rest of my busy sched­ule, I figured that drizzle might actu­ally be my best option today.

So, on with the run­ning gear and out into the rain. Car­ry­ing a water bottle for the first time. I didn’t seem to need it for the first run, but I got a little thirsty towards the end of the last one.

I twanged¹ through my songs and happened upon Baby­shambles’ Fuck Forever, which seemed suit­ably bouncy and rebel­li­ous, so I hit the Genius but­ton, and my iPhone gen­er­ated the per­fect ener­getic playl­ist for my run, churn­ing out:

• Fuck Forever
• Nancy Boy — Placebo
• Ever Fallen in Love — Buzz­cocks (as opposed to the Thea Gilmore ver­sion I very much enjoy, too)
• Disco 2000 — Pulp
• The Pas­sen­ger — Iggy Pop
• She Bangs the Drums — The Stone Roses

It even pro­duced Alabama 3’s Woke Up this Morn­ing for the warm­down. Classic.

Any­way. A slightly dif­fer­ent run today. First off, I decided to start Get Run­ning as soon as I got out of the door, rather than wait­ing a bit — I wanted to get through the run and out of the rain before it turned nas­tier. Earlier on this week there were sud­den hail– and thun­der­storms, so I figured I’d try to cut down my chances of get­ting caught out.

Second, as you can see from today’s pic­ture, it was high tide and not low tide, like yes­ter­day. Because of this, there must have been a few boats leav­ing the har­bour, so my route was changed a bit: I nor­mally cross the har­bour by walk­ing across the top of the lock gates, but they were open this morn­ing, so that wouldn’t have got me very far!

So, instead, it was up a con­crete spiral stair­case and onto the A-road flyover/bridge, which has decent enough pave­ment, to start my run­ning just as I got to the top, luck­ily. Jog­ging is one thing; jog­ging up a spiral stair­case seems like it would be a mite trickier…

And after that, pretty much as nor­mal. It was a little harder, not because of the rain, but because my break­fast was still weigh­ing me down a little — I baked fresh bread yes­ter­day, and I couldn’t res­ist scrambled eggs on toast this morn­ing Next time, if I have the time, I’ll leave it a bit longer or have break­fast when I come back!

I arrived back feel­ing pretty chip­per. Although I really must stretch after I’ve fin­ished this blog entry and before my muscles cool down too much. Good job I’m a quick writer!

This is my third run, and the final run of the first week of the Couch to 5K pro­gram. So the next run will be a bit harder. But I have a couple of days off — Get Run­ning is telling me that Wed­nes­day would be a good day for the next run — so I should be doing it when I’m nice and fresh and ready. Until then, have a good week, everyone!

¹ twang, (n): to flick vigour­ously through a list using Apple’s touch­screen inter­face, and stop sud­denly, thus pro­du­cing a pseudo-random selection.