Matt Gets Running

As you know, I’ve been hav­ing prob­lems with my hip — well, in fact my hip and the top bit of my left-hand gluteal mus­cle, or “upper arse”, as I believe it’s tech­ni­cally known. I reckon it may be down to shoes, so yes­ter­day I went shopping.

In Moti, the advice was basi­cally, “well, if you’ve done fine in those shoes for the last six months, prob­a­bly best just to get this year’s ver­sion of the same shoes.” Which seems sen­si­ble. Unfor­tu­nately, they didn’t have my size in stock, so they’re hav­ing them sent along from another branch, and they won’t be around until Friday.

Which I don’t think is ter­ri­ble news — John Bingham’s advice is to give aches a rest before they become actual pain and debil­i­ta­tion, so I may sim­ply skip my mid­week run(s) this week, and go out in my nice news shoes on Sat­ur­day, assum­ing every­thing goes to plan.

As I’ve noticed that my week­end runs don’t seem to give me any­thing like as much gyp — prob­a­bly because they’re over more var­ied, and some­times softer, sur­faces — I went out today for my nor­mal week­end run, and did 7K, which at least didn’t feel like it was mak­ing me ache me any more than I already ache, and cer­tainly felt a lot bet­ter than Wednesday’s 5K.

Today’s pic­ture is from the work being done to fit new lock gates at the Cum­ber­land Basin end of the Float­ing Har­bour. This is pretty impor­tant, as if the lock gates fail, the whole float­ing har­bour could empty pretty sud­denly. With some inter­est­ing impli­ca­tions for Bris­tol, bear­ing in mind it’s mostly the weight of the water that holds a lot of the har­bour walls up…