Matt Gets Running

My left hip’s been play­ing up a bit recently. It’s been quite achey the last couple of days, pos­sibly because of the amount of walk­ing I’ve done, head­ing to Ashton Court and back for vari­ous bits of the Bal­loon Fiesta.

So, I fig­ure I need a bit of a time-out, espe­cially as I don’t want to aggrav­ate it too much before the half mara­thon, which is three weeks today.

But, I don’t want to cut out on exer­cising, so when my friend Dave returned the bike I’d lent him — to tide him over after his got nicked a couple of weeks ago — it seemed like a bit of a sign. I’ve not been out on my bike for ages, at least a year, and it had just been lan­guish­ing in the back yard gath­er­ing dust. Dave returned it spark­ling and shiny and, import­antly, hav­ing tested the brakes for me

Today’s Run­Keeper log, there­fore, isn’t actu­ally a run­ning log, but a cyc­ling log. I did 10K, but that included a few pauses here and there. Not least of which was the first, caused by Bristol’s mari­time side — there’s not a lot you can do if they’re going to slide the road to one side to let a boat go first.

It also included a bit of walk­ing here and there — I don’t know Ashton Court very well, for example, so I man­aged to end up on one track that was really only pass­able by moun­tain bike; the tyres on my hybrid were just slip­ping around. Plus I took a wrong turn every now and again. Still, it’s all good exercise.

And it doesn’t seem to have aggrav­ated my hip like walk­ing there yes­ter­day did.

Don’t know if I’m going to keep cyc­ling swapped for run­ning until the half mara­thon, but it might be sens­ible. Whatever I do, I’m going to have a look through the nice book on stretch­ing my dad bought for me and see what it says about hips, because it could just be that it needs a good bit of reg­u­lar stretching…