Matt Gets Running

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 many people about, and there aren’t any roads to cross. I’m find­ing that this is a huge advant­age of liv­ing next to a middling-size river, and close to a bridge: there are plenty of routes for run­ning that don’t involve cross­ing roads, because people rarely want to drive into the water.

Any­way. I got to the halfway point at 12½ minutes, accord­ing to Get Run­ning, and I was pretty much in town. I knew that I wasn’t halfway around the har­bourside, but some part of me just thought I should carry on.

So I did. The “stop run­ning” voice prompt came when I was still on the other side of the river, but with not too far to go, so I just pressed on. Feel­ing like I’d taken on a chal­lenge, some­how, I crossed the bridge and ploughed on back to the place I’d joined the har­bour at the begin­ning, reach­ing it just after Get Run­ning told me it was time to warm down, so five minutes on from the offi­cial end of the run.

Accord­ing to the GPS (I took it with me because I only real­ised at the last minute that there was only 20% bat­tery left on the iPhone, and I wanted a backup timer) I ran for 2.55 miles, aver­aging 5mph, for 30-and-a-bit minutes. That’s 4.1km!

Bear­ing in mind how I used to slow down to a walk when the PE teacher was out of sight dur­ing cross-country run­ning at school, that’s prob­ably the fur­thest I’ve run in my entire life

Any­way. Pretty chuffed. You can see my route here, though I’ve (prob­ably slightly naugh­tily) taken a snap­shot of it for the blog below.

I’m going to carry on with the rest of the C25K, of course, and maybe not push myself past that limit again — but it’s a good feel­ing to know that I’ve already run for the full half-hour that the plan builds up to, and survived!

Imagery © 2009 Digit­al­Globe, Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky, GeoEye, Get­map­ping plc, The GeoIn­form­a­tion Group. Sourced from Google Maps