Matt Gets Running

I’m ill. Which is fine. I’d spe­cific­ally planned to do bugger-all dur­ing the period between Christ­mas and New Year, and if you’re going to loaf about unshaven for a few days, you might as well fit a cold in while you do it. It helps that — so far — it’s just a reg­u­lar winter lurgy […]

Things I found out on my run last night: 1) It was cold. 2) My hip aches. 3) I was tired. 4) I don’t much care for Arcade Fire. Still, I think it was prob­ably import­ant to drag myself out, reluct­antly, for my first mid-week run of the year. I’ve got to build some momentum […]

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 […]