Matt Gets Running

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 […]

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 […]

From recent exper­i­ence, here are a few tips on how not to train for a half mara­thon: Pick a half-marathon that’s run at the begin­ning of March. This makes sure you have to keep train­ing through the freez­ing, dark winter months. The Bath Half Mara­thon is an ideal choice. Pick an over-ambitious train­ing plan that […]

You may have noticed a short hiatus on the blog. That’s related to the short hiatus in my run­ning. As I men­tioned last time, I’ve been feel­ing a bit tired and run down this month. As a res­ult, I’ve not really been look­ing for­ward to going out for a run, espe­cially on the dark weekday […]

When someone at work emailed me about Santas on the Run, it didn’t take me long to sign up. I mean, for only a ten­ner you get to run around Bris­tol city centre in a Santa cos­tume with a bunch of other nut­cases without actu­ally being arres­ted. And you get to keep the Santa suit […]

Yeah. Not entirely sure I believe the last few kilo­metres of RunKeeper’s log for today’s run: Espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the pace over the last couple of kilo­metres meas­ured around 1.5 minutes per kilo­metre. Although I sup­pose I would prob­ably have needed that kind of speed to fly over the Avon Gorge and sev­eral tall build­ings like that. […]

A nice five miles through Leigh Woods today. It was another altern­at­ing walk/run accord­ing to the train­ing plan thingy I’m fol­low­ing with Run­Keeper, and that helped me up my run­ning pace a bit. Well, apart from on the steeper hills Today’s photo is from Leigh Woods. Leigh Woods is mostly National Trust-owned, and a National […]

After last Sunday’s dis­astrous couldn’t-even-run run, a happy return to nor­mal this morn­ing. I didn’t get out for a mid-week run — that plan got clobbered by a Flickr meet and going to see Wil­liam Gib­son at the Bris­tol Fest­ival of Ideas. But I finally got out today, and did a very sim­ilar route to […]

I’m going to try to get out twice on week­days this week, because it’s been ages since I’ve done that. I seem to have degen­er­ated into a one-midweek, once-at-the-weekend pat­tern, mostly since the Bris­tol 10K. I think I need to start build­ing the aver­age miles up a bit again, and get out when I can. Today’s […]

My feet seem to be a bit achey after run­ning recently. It sud­denly occurred to me that, even though it only seems like a few weeks ago that I bought a new pair of shoes, it might actu­ally have been rather longer. And that’s where a blog comes in handy. I first bought proper running […]