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