Matt Gets Running

I don’t know when this week became the week to push and to prove myself. But appar­ently it did. I should have got out run­ning last night, but I was knack­ered after work, so I did what any brave and stout young fel­low would have done: gave up on the idea and went to bed early. This […]

See­ing my friend Bert’s tweet ear­lier on got me think­ing. I have gen­er­ally been going for endurance rather than speed, espe­cially recently. Also in my mind was my friend Bananza’s advice that “if it’s easy, you’re not work­ing hard enough”. So, tonight I I mixed things up a bit. I fig­ured it’d do me good […]

You never know whether it’s going to be a good run until you get out there. Today I woke up at 6:30am with a headache. I got up, took two parac­eta­mol, and went back to bed. When I got up again at 11am, I still felt a bit rub­bish. Nev­er­the­less, because it looked like it […]

I’ve only jogged around the har­bour once before, dur­ing week 7 of the C25K. Tonight I did it again, and did it a bit quicker, too. So, all good. I’d got a bit bored with run­ning along the Port­way all the time, so although the round-the-harbour run feels quite short for me now (it’s only […]

After my dread­ful slog the last time I jogged out along the Port­way, I was a bit wor­ried about this evening. Turned out I had no need to be: tonight was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. It was just the same (slightly bor­ing) straight 5K, but this time I felt fine all the way through it, and was back […]

…in the best of all pos­si­ble worlds”. I’d not noticed this bit of lit­er­ally Pan­gloss­ian opti­mism in Bab­sham­bles’ Deft Left Hand before. But it seemed to be the theme of the morn­ing, as I climbed up into the sun­shine on the Downs, and my iPod ran­domly picked the most cheer­fully British of Pete Doherty’s output, […]

This morn­ing, Radio 4’s nor­mally quite reserved weath­er­man Philip Avery used the phrase “rain and rain and rain”. Basi­cally, if you’re in the UK, the fore­cast is for rain, day after day, for at least the next seven days. So, this evening, when I got home and noticed we seemed to be in-between rain­storms, I figured […]

Run­ning is pretty sim­ple, as sports go. There’s not a lot of sexy equip­ment. So far, I’ve got away with some good shoes, some socks, some shorts, and a top or two. But I added a com­pli­ca­tion at the week­end. My cheap Puma sport socks were a bit rub­bish, espe­cially if it had been rain­ing and […]

This morn­ing I had a bit of an acci­dent. My gen­eral plan was to skip the run­ning last night, and instead go out this morn­ing, as I’ve found my last few Sat­ur­days have been low-energy, wasted days, and I thought I’d see if start­ing with a run would help pick me up a bit. So, I […]

“How far should I run tonight?“ “6K? No, erm, 5K. Erm.“ “I could do 6K.“ “Okay. 6K, then.” And so it was decided. Tonight I was a bit knack­ered, but I did feel like doing a decent dis­tance on the flat, so I ran 3km out along the Port­way, and 3km back again. Look­ing at the […]