Matt Gets Running

Amazon.co.uk Wid­gets Tonight was a bit of a slow plod. I had a low point on the way out, some­where near halfway, where I was just drag­ging my body through the motions, and feel­ing pretty heavy with it. But I per­se­vered, mostly with the help of PJ Harvey’s astound­ing Mer­cury prizewin­ner Sto­ries from the City, Stories […]

If you’ve been pay­ing atten­tion, you’ll have been won­der­ing where I’ve been for the past week and a bit. Gala­vant­ing, that’s where1. Last week­end I nipped over to Clovelly, in Devon, to see my friend Steve. This week­end I was at my friends Kavey & Pete’s wed­ding anniver­sary party. In between I took a whistle-stop […]

I’ve decided what my reward’s going to be for get­ting to the end of the C25K. I’ve been need­ing a new com­pact cam­era for a while now. My ven­er­a­ble Konica-Minolta DiM­age X-60 was a good first dig­i­tal cam­era, but it’s now bat­tered, bruised and lack­ing in bat­tery staying-power. Not only that, but at 5 megapixels […]

Today, for the first time, I didn’t use Get Run­ning. I’ve only got a few runs left in the C25K pro­gramme, so I fig­ured I’d play with Run­K­eeper, one of my options for con­tin­ued geek­i­ness after I check all of the lit­tle boxes on Get Running’s “progress path”. Run­K­eeper is one of the best iPhone […]

Amazon.co.uk Wid­gets Today I did Week 8, Run 2. Instead of my cus­tom­ary mixed-up playlist, I took the chance to lis­ten to this year’s Mer­cury prizewin­ner, Speech Debelle’s Speech Ther­apy. Run­ning seems to be a good time to get back to the rather old-fashioned pas­time of lis­ten­ing to entire albums, as long as they’re suitable. […]

Today’s update is brought to you by Lanacane Anti-Chafing Gel. In my 28-minute road-test this evening, it did exactly what it says on the tube. I rec­om­mend it to any other run­ners out there whose thighs (or any­thing else, for that mat­ter) tend to rub together a bit too much… Any­way, with that bit of too-much-information […]

This evening, I failed. This is the first time I’ve found myself unable to fol­low an instruc­tion from Get Run­ning on the C25K. Specif­i­cally, I failed to stop. Today, I set off on yet another dif­fer­ent route. This time, I headed into town instead of out of it, down the har­bour­side. That was fine; there weren’t too […]

I decided to try a lit­tle exper­i­ment this evening. Was my cheer­ful, bouncy per­for­mance on the last run because I’m get­ting bet­ter, or because of the dif­fer­ent route I took? So, I went back to the old route, along the tow­path. I also took my ven­er­a­ble Garmin eTrex along with me again. And I’m pleased to report […]

No, I’m not doing one. But I did pop out this morn­ing and take a few pho­tos of the Bris­tol half-marathon. Just thought I’d share!

Well now that, that was a dod­dle. Really. Week 7, Run 1, done. Today I decided to try a dif­fer­ent route for the first time — not wildly dif­fer­ent in direc­tion, though, just along the other side of the river. Here’s the route on Gmaps Pedome­ter. But it’s amaz­ing what kind of dif­fer­ence the width of […]