Matt Gets Running

Yes, the race pack has arrived With two half-marathons under my belt now, I feel fairly con­fid­ent about this Sunday’s Bris­tol Half, des­pite the fact that the belt in ques­tion has had to expand by a notch or two in the last few months. A hol­i­day in the Lake Dis­trict actu­ally saw me lose a […]

It was a lovely day for a jog in Bris­tol. I was a bit delayed get­ting star­ted. I nor­mally walk across the top of a lock gate on my walk to the start of the towpath, but this morn­ing the lock gate was open to let a little batch of ships and row­ing boats out […]

Since my last angst-filled posts, I have man­aged to get out a couple of times, but I’m not back even to twice-a-week run­ning yet. Still. On the plus side, last Sunday I got out for a 10K run through Leigh Woods, albeit with a bit of a walk­ing break on the steep bits. This week­end I […]

I’ve had my fail­ures. Most of them, with run­ning so far, have been indi­vidual screwups. Bad runs, bad shoes, that kind of thing. But at the moment, I’m facing a lar­ger fail­ure. I’ve repeatedly failed to lose weight since I star­ted run­ning, but recently — the last year or so — I’ve been act­ively putting […]

The Bris­tol 10K was my first race, this time last year. It’s a good, fun race, with a whole lot of people — 9,000 fin­ished this year — and it’s right on my door­step. It only takes me twenty minutes to get to the start line, and then we run right back past my flat […]

A very heart­felt thanks to every­one who sponsored my Bath Half run. The RNLI are a great cause, and they need all the dona­tions they can get. All in all, you donated £120 at my Just Giv­ing page. My employer kindly matched those dona­tions, and with that, plus the Gift Aid that can be claimed back from […]

Well, that was fun! Okay, if I’m being entirely hon­est, the first eight or nine miles were fun, and it was more of a slog after that, but still! It was a nice day for run­ning. It was pretty chilly first thing, and espe­cially hanging around in the run­ners’ vil­lage and the start pens, but it […]

So, it’s the even­ing before the Bath Half Mara­thon. In the morn­ing I’ll be head­ing off for the Bath Race­course, who are run­ning a ser­vice where you park at the race­course and they get you into town on a bus, which seemed like an easy option. Today I’ve taken things nice and easy. I’ve done […]

I’m sit­ting in a café writ­ing this blog entry, look­ing smugly out at the weather I would have been slog­ging wetly through if I’d gone out for my nor­mal Sunday run. It’s a typ­ic­ally Brit­ish Spring selec­tion of ran­dom sun­shine, showers and hail out there, rotat­ing about every five minutes. Nice. Luck­ily, I took a […]

Today I went out for my first jog of the year — my first jog in more than a month, in fact, hav­ing taken Decem­ber off! It wasn’t as dif­fi­cult as I feared it might have been. Help­ing with that was the weather — sunny, cool but not freez­ing, just right for jog­ging. I felt […]