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 morn­ing, though, feel­ing fresh as a daisy and clearly a bit guilty about not doing 5K last night, I trot­ted out onto the Port­way for my usual week­end plod. But dur­ing the warmup, prob­a­bly only a few min­utes in to Dire Straits’ Tele­graph Road — great music for push­ing your­self up Bridge Val­ley Road to, by the way — I decided to make up for last night’s lost distance.

So, doing a bit of quick geo­graph­i­cal plan­ning in my head, I took the route that got me through 8K the other week­end, and added an extra loop of Dur­d­ham Down to it.

And here’s the result:

Yup. 10K. Or, as I heard it in my head when I fin­ished — and you’ll have to par­don my French — “ten fuck­ing kilometres”.

In fact, a lit­tle bit more than that, as I was so close to my nor­mal fin­ish point when I’d com­pleted 10K exactly that I decided to push on and do the extra few hun­dred metres, just to get to the lamp post out­side the Avon Gorge Hotel that I tra­di­tion­ally slap to mark the end of my long runs.

And I’m faster than I fig­ured I would be, too, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing I started off with the usual big hill. Look­ing at it, I think I came in com­fort­ably under an hour and a quar­ter for the 10K. Nice.

Any­way, I’m a bit hun­gry now, for some rea­son, so it’s time to demol­ish the baguette and fruity flap­jack I just bought from Chan­dos Deli…

I think I should prob­a­bly give myself another cou­ple of days off now, so I’ll prob­a­bly catch up with you again on Monday :)