Midweek

Hurrah! Actually managed to get out and do a midweek run. Nothing thrilling, just a dusk run along the Portway and back. But getting out on a weeknight is good, and hopefully I can do it again next week and start getting back into the habit of them.

Anyway. I’d best go and stretch, and then get some food inside me! See you all on the other side of the Royal Wedding…

Up With the Seagull

IMG 2511 copyI would title this entry “up with the lark”, but I don’t actually know what a lark looks like. If there were any larks in Bristol, the seagulls would probably have eaten them by now.

This time yesterday I was still in bed, having a long, lounging Saturday morning lie-in. So it was a bit of a wrench to get out of bed early today, drag my kit on and run 4K. But that’s exactly what I did, and I feel virtuous now, bordering on smug.

Okay, so it was only 4K, but it was the first run in ages that hasn’t involved illness or defective shoes or some other problem. And it went fine. I’m going to try to get a couple more of those under my belt this week.

My main motivation for getting out early was the surprisingly glorious bank holiday weather, which seems to be defying UK stereotypes by staying bright and hot and sunny for days on end. Certainly it’s not the kind of weather where I’d want to get out at my usual Sunday running hour and bake in the midday heat…

On that note, I think it may be time for some spring cleaning, and maybe a spot of gardening. It’s that kind of day…

Grump

Bluebells in Leigh Woods

I’ll start off with a nice happy picture, just to show that some of today’s run was quite pleasant. These are a few of the millions of bluebells currently carpeting Leigh Woods, which makes the woods even nicer than usual for jogging.

And it was also a nice sunny day, as you can probably tell. But those are about the only good things. And now I’m grumpy.

I started off running feeling okay-ish. It’d been a while, because of my recent bout of flu, but I mostly seem to be over that; even the residual cough is far less enthusiastic now. But I wasn’t feeling 100%.

I wasn’t helped by RunKeeper (or, perhaps more charitably to RunKeeper, maybe the GPS on my iPhone) having one of its occasional “funny five minutes”. I realised something was going a bit odd when I got the “you’ve run four kilometres” voice prompt really very soon after the 3km voice prompt. Then, thirty seconds or so later, RunKeeper told me I’d got to 5km, and that I was averaging 4 minutes per kilometre. That’s about 15kph, or, to put it another way, significantly faster than I’ve ever run.

So, my RunKeeper log of today’s run is pretty screwed.

Worse was to come. At somewhere around the real 5km mark, I realised my shiny new Mizuno Wave Inspire 7s were giving me a blister. One bit of the right shoe, in the instep, seemed to be rubbing a bit.

I carried on for another half a kilometre or so, then had to start walking. No sense in making things worse, I figured.

So, basically I gave up and limped back across the bridge to Clifton Village, and now I’ve got to see if I can send these shoes back. Annoyingly, this is the first pair of running shoes I bought from the internet, rather than in lovely local shop Moti. D’oh.

So, that’s my joy of running today. Better get out there again soon, and probably in my old, reliable — if slightly worn down — shoes. I don’t want to have running associated too much in my mind with pain and grumpiness. Bah.

Not Running, but Walking

It has been a crap weekend. I took Friday off to give myself some extra time for getting stuff done this weekend. Then on Friday I was ill, strangely feverish, and feeling really weird. That ended up in insomnia which kept me awake until about 3am on Saturday. Saturday I finally woke up at about 11am with a headache.

By Saturday evening I wasn’t feeling too bad. But it was really too late to do anything much, so I just went to bed. This time I fell asleep pretty easily. And woke up at about 11am today, Sunday, with a headache.

At that point I decided that running probably wasn’t on the agenda. Pounding the pavement with a pounding head is just a bad idea. But by the afternoon I was feeling like I could actually use some exercise, so I went shopping — only I went on foot, which ended up as an 8km shopping expedition, which according to RunKeeper at least burned off 786 calories…

I’m still feeling a bit rubbish, but at least I got out there and got some fresh air. I still haven’t really worked out what’s wrong with me — I seem to have developed a bit of a cough to go with my headache — but I’m hoping it’s just some passing bug that I’ll shake off soon. Especially as I still have to get all that stuff done…