Matt Gets Running

Today I ran the Bris­tol 10K, mostly with my friend (and erstwhile boss) Mike. Mike had ori­gin­ally planned to part­ner up with a friend who’s a fair bit faster than me, but she got a hip injury at the last minute, unfor­tu­nately. So, I rebel­li­ously brought my green-numbered self into the red lane with Mike […]

My only recent run was a slow 5K up the hill to the shops on Sat­urday. That’s because I’m (a) busy as hell this week, and some­thing has to give, and (b) run­ning the Bris­tol 10K on Sunday! If you’d like to help me out with some charity-based encour­age­ment, I’ll be run­ning the 10K in […]

April was a good month. I ran twice as far in April — 62.5km — than I did in any month in the pre­vi­ous year. So that’s a def­in­ite “win” when it comes to build­ing up my momentum. There’s been a slight fal­ter­ing, though, in the first week of May, as I only went out […]

And so ends another week where I only man­aged two runs. My lack of time this week was some­what exacer­bated by the cur­rent UK weather situ­ation. The UK media have been hav­ing a (water­logged) field day recently, because if there’s one thing that the Brit­ish love talk­ing about more than weather, it’s ironic weather, and […]

The tele­vi­sion cov­er­age of the Lon­don Mara­thon should have been a great inspir­a­tion to go jog­ging on Sunday. Unfor­tu­nately I was watch­ing it from behind a hangover, on a sofa quite a long way from home. I did, in the end, struggle out for a run on Sunday, but it was just a des­ultory jog around […]

I lost momentum a bit this week. I didn’t get out for two mid-week jogs, mostly because as well as being back in the office 9 to 5, I’m also work­ing hard out­side the office, and had a couple of even­ings taken up with social stuff, too. Still, I man­aged to head out last night, […]

I’m man­aging to keep up the momentum, it seems. Just came back from today’s 7.5K around Leigh Woods. I’m still not back up to the level of fit­ness that lets me get up that hill in one unin­ter­rup­ted jog, but it didn’t take long to get my breath back at the pic­nic table after the […]

One of the prob­lems I’ve faced while try­ing to get back into the habit of run­ning three times a week is a lack of that men­tal itch that says “you’ve not been run­ning recently, you know.” It hasn’t helped that this is a busy week, as I pre­pare for a return to an office job […]

Des­pite the huge omin­ous cloud that was lurk­ing over Bris­tol when I headed out this lunch­time, it actu­ally turned out to be quite a sunny run in the end. Today was just a quick jog up Bridge Val­ley Road, along Ladies Mile, then back around that sec­tion of Clifton Down, fin­ish­ing with lunch in Boston Tea […]

So, after the ropey Bath Half, I’m try­ing to get back to a level of fit­ness where I won’t embar­rass myself at the Bris­tol 10K. That means get­ting back out and run­ning three times a week, like I used to. So far, that seems to be going well. I headed out for 5Ks on Monday and […]