Matt Gets Running

I had a day off work. It looked like a nice morn­ing for a little jog.

So, I went out for a little jog. Which turned into a longer jog. Which turned into a bit of an epic.

I did set out with the idea of going for a longish run. I set off with plenty of water, because even though I star­ted fairly early, it’s a pretty hot day. And I made my way down the towpath, and headed up into Leigh Woods.

I was feel­ing fine when I got up the big hill into the woods them­selves. I figured that if I wanted to run a bit extra, I’d do it in the woods, rather than out of them, because the sun was pretty fierce and tree cover was nice. So I did a couple of loops of the “purple” path in the woods, which added about 5K to my planned journey.

I stopped at 10K to have an energy bar thing — and I can vastly recom­mend Mule Bars over those bloody gel energy pack things I tried before. Mule Bars actu­ally taste like they’ve been made from actual food by a human, rather than cooked up in a lab my a crazed robot scientist.

While I was stopped, I asked Twit­ter to remind me how far a half mara­thon was. 21km, came the reply, give or take a decimal place here or there.

Okay. So I wasn’t even halfway. Nev­er­the­less, I headed back into the woods to come out at the Beg­gar Bush Lane exit and head over the Clifton Sus­pen­sion Bridge to the Downs, and star­ted a long loop of Clifton Down and Durd­ham Down.

It was at this point — just after the nasty little hill that gets you onto the Downs at the junc­tion with Bridge Val­ley Road — that I star­ted hav­ing prob­lems. It was hot. I was hot. I reined in my pace a bit, and enjoyed a bit of breeze by Sea Wall. But fun­da­ment­ally, I was being pretty unlucky with the cloud cover; it was fairly dir­ect blaz­ing sun­shine and there’s not a lot of shade on the Downs.

But I kept on going. And I kept on going. I stopped to change from pod­casts to music, after I ran out of pod­casts. I kept on going.

Even­tu­ally, I pretty much ran out of run, some­where around 16km, though I was mildly perked up by the thought that I’d now run fur­ther than I’d ever run before, and kept up a slow jog for a while.

At 19km, I com­pletely ran out of juice. Don’t know how much was the heat, how much was the hills, and how much was just because I’d run much fur­ther than I have in ages. But I ran out of running.

So, bloody-minded to the end, I walked a fur­ther 2 kilo­metres, pretty much exactly, to get myself to 21km. At which point I gave a little cheer, stopped Run­Keeper, and real­ised that I had another half a kilo­metre to walk to get back to Clifton Vil­lage any­way. So I kept on walking.

It took me more than three-and-a-quarter hours, and I was walk­ing for two kilo­metres of it, but I think I can fairly lay claim to hav­ing run a half-marathon in training.

And I’m not so scared of doing it on the day, now. Because, for starters, the Bris­tol half mara­thon is in Septem­ber, and shouldn’t be quite so warm, and it’s also pretty much flat. It’s cer­tainly a pan­cake com­pared to what I did today — Run­Keeper reck­ons there was a total elev­a­tion of 372m over my undu­lat­ing course, and I can believe it. There was a lot of up and down…

So, big pat on the back, I think. I don’t feel too bad, hav­ing had a nice lunch and a large latte in Boston Tea Party, fol­lowed by a Very Long Bath Indeed. I don’t think I’ll be run­ning for a few days, but I don’t appear to have developed much in the way of aches, pains or problems.

So, to sum­mar­ise: Win! Yay!