Matt Gets Running

My playlist for tomor­row. I won’t get through all of this, because there’s two-and-a-half hours of music there. It’ll be on shuf­fle. Song Artist Amer­ica The Indel­i­cates The 32nd Of Decem­ber Babysham­bles Sci­ence Mon­key Swal­lows The Uni­verse Spin­nin’ Speech Debelle Ace­tone Kenickie Arcady Peter Doherty Albion Babysham­bles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band The Bea­t­les A […]

Nice and easy today, after last weekend’s 12K effort. I was meet­ing friends at Bris­tol Zoo at 11, so I had to get up early to get run­ning first. Which I did man­age, despite the best efforts of the LUNs — my short­hand for my Loud Upstairs Neigh­bours — who man­aged to wake me up […]

I think the new shoes have done the trick. Some­thing has, any­way, as tonight’s run was lots bet­ter than my last 5K effort down the Port­way. My hip feels fine, and I didn’t feel totally knack­ered from the get-go like I did last time, either. Which is all good. Even bet­ter, there were actu­ally some […]

I went to a cock­tail party last night. Even though I don’t drink, it meant I was up until about 2am, so I didn’t drag myself out for a jog until about half past one today. Bit of a con­trast from last week’s 7am enthu­si­asm! Any­way, to get myself going, I down­loaded Lady Gaga’s album […]

I don’t exer­cise in the morn­ing. I’m just not a morn­ing per­son. Vir­tu­ally all my run­ning is done in the evening, or, at the very ear­li­est, lunchtime, at the week­ends. So. A bit odd, then, that this morn­ing I woke up just before the alarm clock did that quiet lit­tle *clonk* it does when the […]

Hur­rah! At last, I’m back out on the street (that made me sound like a des­per­ate hooker, didn’t it? Hmm.) The snow has mostly melted away — the only bits I saw were the huge lumps that have been rolled to the sides of Clifton Down here and there, as pic­tured, tran­si­tory snow-boulders that stand as […]

“…don’t look out you’re going to break your neck.” The Prim­i­tives’ fab 1988 sin­gle, Crash, poured some good advice out into my head­phones as I ran this evening. Because it was bloody freez­ing. Look, even my Weath­er­Pro iPhone app said it was minus 0ºC. That’s like freez­ing, only even freezinger.1 Luck­ily, the ice seemed to be […]

You never know whether it’s going to be a good run until you get out there. Today I woke up at 6:30am with a headache. I got up, took two parac­eta­mol, and went back to bed. When I got up again at 11am, I still felt a bit rub­bish. Nev­er­the­less, because it looked like it […]

…in the best of all pos­si­ble worlds”. I’d not noticed this bit of lit­er­ally Pan­gloss­ian opti­mism in Bab­sham­bles’ Deft Left Hand before. But it seemed to be the theme of the morn­ing, as I climbed up into the sun­shine on the Downs, and my iPod ran­domly picked the most cheer­fully British of Pete Doherty’s output, […]

“…when the call it comes I will be ready for war.” Today’s title is from Alabama 3’s fan­tas­tic track Power In the Blood, from the album of the same name. It helped me get off to a nice start on the Downs after I’d clam­bered up Bridge Val­ley Road. I woke up to the sound of fairly […]