Matt Gets Running

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 went out, start­ing along the same route as last week­end, up Bridge Val­ley Road, and along Ladies Mile to loop around the Downs.

After last week, I fig­ured I should see if I could add an extra lit­tle bit to the run to see if I could make it up to seven kilo­me­tres, so I hooked a lit­tle extra bit onto my run, turn­ing right at the Water Tower and cir­cling the top bit of Dur­d­ham Down as well.

Only it turned out that I’m not that hot at judg­ing dis­tances on maps. By the time I’d passed the Sea Wall and got halfway back to Clifton Vil­lage, I was def­i­nitely feel­ing it. It wasn’t so bad that I needed to stop, but my energy lev­els seemed unusu­ally low. And then I checked my dis­tance, and I’d already done seven kilometres!

I kept on pound­ing on — quite slowly in places, like the steep­ish hill up to the Obser­va­tory, but still just putting one foot in front of the other fast enough to count as jog­ging — and got all the way to my usual ulti­mate des­ti­na­tion, Princess Vic­to­ria Street, home of Cof­fee #1 and some of the best vanilla latte in Bristol.

And it turned out I’d done my longest run by far. I man­aged more than 8km — check­ing the map and stats on Run­K­eeper, and knock­ing 5 min­utes and 0.34km off for the walk­ing warm-up, I did 8.36km in one hour and three min­utes. Con­sid­er­ing that included Bridge Val­ley Road, and totalled 184m of ver­ti­cal climb­ing, accord­ing to Run­K­eeper, I think that’s pretty good, about 7.5 min­utes per kilo­me­tre pace.

It also means that I’m pretty damn cer­tain I could do 10km on a flat route with very lit­tle prob­lem :) But I don’t think I’m going to try that any time soon, going up to 8km was enough of a jump for the time being!

Any­way. My pub­lic thanks to Radio 4’s News Quiz, on pod­cast, for keep­ing me going up Bridge Val­ley Road, and Speech Debelle for cov­er­ing the rest of the journey :)