Matt Gets Running

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. Speech Ther­apy worked well, with its rel­a­tively gen­tle beat and melan­choly feel keep­ing me at a mod­er­ate pace all the way through…

Today’s run did hurt a bit, though, because I had a really good mas­sage yes­ter­day. If any­one wants a fan­tas­tic Thai mas­sage in Bris­tol, by the way, get your­self down to Absolute Thai Ther­apy, just off White­ladies Road, near Richer Sounds.

Their mas­sage left me extremely relaxed, and a lit­tle ten­der here and there, which prob­a­bly slowed me down a bit. It also per­haps put me into a more sug­gestible and opti­mistic mood, because yes­ter­day evening, a few hours after­wards, I signed up for the Bris­tol 10K!

I’d been chat­ting to Mike, of the Bris­tol Run­ning Resource, over lunch yes­ter­day. He men­tioned the 10K after ask­ing me what my run­ning goals were, when I realised I didn’t really have any, beyond fin­ish­ing the Couch to 5K.

The 10K takes place in May, giv­ing me more than six months to get ready. This seems a com­fort­able dis­tance away. It also gives me a goal to think about once I’m through the C25K. And another rea­son to keep on run­ning, which can only be a good thing.

So, encour­aged by Mike, and weak­ened by mas­sage, I got home, headed for the web­site, put my name down and paid up. Once the Couch to 5K is com­pleted, looks like I’ll be doing a 5K to 10K — somehow…