Today’s jog was very much the same as the last, just 5K out along the towpath and back. It wasn’t a brilliant experience. It was muggy and I was tired, and I just got out there, did it and came back, stopping only to play with my new camera a bit.

New camera? Yes! To mark my first stone of weight loss since I took up jogging, I bought myself a better pocketable camera, this time going for the Sony Cybershot DSC-TX1, which is a nifty little thing, and may turn out to be better than my late, lamented Panasonic Lumix FP8. Only time and a few pictures in better light and better weather than we had tonight will tell.

It’s certainly better than the Lumix FP3 that I used as an intermediate replacement. I quickly learned to dislike the FP3, with its annoyingly useless touchscreen and rubbish, noisy image quality. What’s the point of 14 million pixels if six million of them are displaying sensor noise? Grr.

So, I think this is a good purchase, and a nice reward for losing 16lbs so far. Maybe if I lose another stone, I’ll get myself an iPad…

And that’s where a blog comes in handy. I first bought proper running shoes on 29 August last year. They seemed to do me okay until I started getting an achey hip and some other aches and pains in February this year. So, that’d be about five months.

It took me a while to figure out it was the shoes that were the problem, so I didn’t buy a new pair of Mizunos until the beginning of March. Which would have been, erm, about five months ago.

So, I’m thinking that maybe these are early warning signs that I’ve nearly worn out another pair of shoes. Especially as I’ve probably run more in the last five months than I did in the five months before, because I wasn’t doing that much long-distance stuff back then.

Hmm. Five months doesn’t seem long for a pair of shoes to last, but I’ve heard people say they replace their running shoes every six months. And I am heavier than your average runner. It may be time to treat myself again…

About the only thing of note — apart from the rather lovely view I spotted on the way back — was the lack of graffiti on the pedestrian ramp down to the towpath. It’s had some fairly offensive stuff on it for months, with the relatively recent addition of a swastika.

On last week’s run I took a photo of it — I’ll spare you the image itself — to remind me of it when I got home. Thus prodded, I found Bristol City Council’s graffiti reporting web page, and stuck in the details.

And sometime since last Wednesday evening, the council have painted it out, so I don’t have to look at it and feel mildly annoyed by it. Win! This being Bristol, home of some seriously good street art (and no, it’s not just Banksy), the council tend to be a bit more switched on to either extreme of the stuff-painted-on-walls spectrum, I guess.

And tomorrow, I run the Bristol 10K :)

I’ll be starting off in the second of the two groups — i.e. with the slow people, at the back — at 9:45 tomorrow morning. This is my first ever race. Not that I’ll be treating it as a race; there’s nobody I want to beat. I’ll be happy just to get around and to enjoy the shared experience of running with a whole bunch of other nutters, whether they’re the pros who I’ll only see passing me on their way back as I head out towards the Suspension Bridge, or the people in gorilla costume who I might stand a chance of keeping up with.

If all goes according to plan I’ll be using RunKeeper to track me as I go around, and if the technology works then you’ll be able to watch me run on a live map at my public RunKeeper page. Just visit the web page during the race and you’ll see where I am, and be able to watch a little dot crawl slowly around a map for an hour and a quarter. No, I don’t expect many avid viewers, but hey…

Anyway. I’m runner number 9210. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get through the start, but I should be finished about an hour and a quarter after that. I’m really not sure how long it’ll take me, because I’ve never run 10K on the flat, or run with a bunch of other people before. But I’m sure I’ll be posting a post-run update sometime tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll let you know how I get on!

I had intended to go down the towpath on the other side of the river, but I was confounded by the tide — at the moment, the lock gate replacement work on the harbour means that they’re just opening both the lock gates at high tide and letting through a backlog of shipping traffic — and if there’s anything tall, then the flyover has to move out of the way, too.

As you can just about see in the picture, that means there’s no way to the south side of the river while it’s happening! So, as I was in a hurry to get through my jog and head up to meet my friend Nicki at the Thali Cafe, I just headed out along the main road instead.

I’ll finish with a very quick restaurant review of the Thali Cafe in Clifton Village: three stars, would’ve been four if there’d actually been any lamb to speak of in the spiced lamb “special”. As it was, there was a small, solitary chunk of lamb hiding among a mound of chick peas… Ho hum.

Welcome to the 100th blog posting on Matt Gets Running :) To mark the occasion, here’s a video of my (Good) Friday run, along the Avon Gorge towpath, up the hill into Leigh Woods, around a little detour—to reverse out of some of the worst of the mud I ran into!—and then back to the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Today I was planning on blogging about weight, and watching this video really underlines why it’s something I need to talk about. Because, fairly clearly, although I’ve been jogging for nine months, I’m still quite lardy.

In fact, I’ve not lost much weight at all. Since I started running, I’ve come from around 17 stone 7 lbs (245lbs, or 111kg) down to 16 stone 12.5 lbs. That’s a drop of 8.5lbs, or a smidge under 4kg.

That’s not to say that running hasn’t had a significant impact on my weight. Because before I took up running, I was slowly but steadily putting weight on, rather than taking it off. Goodness knows what weight I’d be by now if I hadn’t effectively reversed that trend, and all by getting out and running.

But I’ve come to realise recently that absolutely the best thing I could do to speed myself up, and to avoid injury, and reduce strain on my joints and muscles, especially my occasionally achey hip, is to lose more weight.

Now, I could run even more, which would certainly burn some more calories. But that’s unlikely to be too effective. A pound of weight equates to about 3,500 calories (kcal.) The longest run I’ve ever done was the 12K I did a few weekends ago. And, according to the RunKeeper log, that burned 1,437 calories.

Which is the equivalent of less than half a pound of fat. So even if I did two of those every week, on top of my normal runs, and changed nothing else at all, I’d lose less than a pound a week.

So, that doesn’t seem like the most efficient way of doing things. It may be time to mention the dreaded “D word”: diet.

Now, my normal diet is actually not too bad. I don’t eat too much unhealthy crap. I have a tendency towards eating cake after lunch at the weekends, but apart from that, my calories are generally coming from quite healthy food choices. I don’t eat junk, I don’t drink alcohol, I hardly ever eat chocolate bars. I’ve not eaten in a McDonald’s or a KFC since the 1990s. And even then it was probably under protest.

No. My problem is, quite simply, eating too much. My portions are too big.

I’ve been gradually chipping away at that a bit recently, using some simple methods — buying Kellogg’s Variety Packs for breakfast, for example, so there’s a pre-measured amount that’s easy to stick to. And cutting extras out of my lunchtime meal at work.

I’ve not really attacked my evening meal yet, or addressed my latte habit. And, most importantly, I’ve not actually deliberately tried to restrict my calorie intake to less than I need. I mean, my current eating habits appear to be sensible and sustainable, in that I’m still, very gradually, losing weight. So I’m clearly not eating more than I need to eat.

But if I want to make running a half marathon in September as easy as possible, the best thing I can do, apart from keeping up my training and gradually building up my distance, is to attack my weight through diet as well as through running.

I think a sensible goal would be to lose around a pound a week. Given that the half-marathon is on 5th September, around five months away, that would mean about 20 pounds. To give myself a nice “round” number — albeit in the antiquated avoirdupois scale I still cling to to measure my body weight — I’ll call my target weight 15-and-a-half stone, which is 217 pounds, or about 98 kilos.

So. That’s my target. Fifteen and a half stone by 5 September. And I’ll be blogging my progress with my weight along with my progress with the running. Who knows, possibly accompanied by pictures and video, you never know!

Have a happy Easter. Personally, in the greatest tradition of diets, I’m going to start mine after the holiday. In the meantime, where did I put that Cadbury’s Easter egg?

In Moti, the advice was basically, “well, if you’ve done fine in those shoes for the last six months, probably best just to get this year’s version of the same shoes.” Which seems sensible. Unfortunately, they didn’t have my size in stock, so they’re having them sent along from another branch, and they won’t be around until Friday.

Which I don’t think is terrible news — John Bingham’s advice is to give aches a rest before they become actual pain and debilitation, so I may simply skip my midweek run(s) this week, and go out in my nice news shoes on Saturday, assuming everything goes to plan.

As I’ve noticed that my weekend runs don’t seem to give me anything like as much gyp — probably because they’re over more varied, and sometimes softer, surfaces — I went out today for my normal weekend run, and did 7K, which at least didn’t feel like it was making me ache me any more than I already ache, and certainly felt a lot better than Wednesday’s 5K.

Today’s picture is from the work being done to fit new lock gates at the Cumberland Basin end of the Floating Harbour. This is pretty important, as if the lock gates fail, the whole floating harbour could empty pretty suddenly. With some interesting implications for Bristol, bearing in mind it’s mostly the weight of the water that holds a lot of the harbour walls up…

I’m starting to wonder if I might need to replace my running shoes. I bought them pretty much exactly six months ago, so they must have travelled a fair distance. And of course, they’ve had seventeen stone of Matt pounding into them for all those kilometres…

Also, looking back, I said “my left hip is sore” in my final entry of the C25K — just three days before I bought my trusty Mizunos, and I don’t remember my hip troubling me again much after that until now.

I’m sure it’s not all to do with the shoes. I’m a bit knackered anyway, I’ve not been going to bed early enough. But I think there may be some link. So, on Saturday, I think I might pop along to Moti and buy myself a pair of new running shoes…

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 The Fame Monster — currently on Amazon UK at the bargain price of £3 — and got out into the spring sunshine.

As I was tired and a bit headachey — must have been the guava juice — I kept it slow and steady and didn’t go too far. It felt pretty good, though, once I’d got up Bridge Valley Road and got going, and I decided to do a bit more than I’d planned, looping around Durdham Down to finish at just a smidge over 7km.

This makes up a bit for not running on Friday, I suppose. Looking at my stats over the last six months, Friday is the day of the week on which I tend to run least, coming in just below Monday. I think I should therefore be a bit more realistic about planning to run on Fridays, and maybe try heading out on Tuesday and Thursday if I want to go out twice during the week…

Anyway. Finished my 7K, went and got some lunch from Boston Tea Party, who are always lovely and friendly and do great coffee, and then wandered home along Royal York Crescent, which is today’s picture. This came straight from the iPhone, put together in camera from three shots, using Debacle Software’s Pano App.

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 alarm’s not actually switched on, and thought, “Hmm. I fancy a jog.”

Even more odd, I actually went and did it. None of the stats look unusual on the RunKeeper log. 7K in 56 minutes, a little under 8 minutes per kilometre — slow, but not unusual when Bridge Valley Road is involved. What’s unusual is that the run started at just past 7am on a Sunday morning.

It made a nice change, actually. I think I suffered a bit more towards the end than usual — there’s a final little incline I have to get up, and it seemed harder today. Maybe I was lacking blood sugar.

But on the whole, it was a pretty nice experience. I was out early enough to disturb some wildlife I don’t normally see — a cormorant, for example, flapping away to the other side of the river as I bounded past, and the crows, yet to be relegated to the sidelines by the Sunday football leagues, pulling their stringy breakfast from the Downs.

And I finished on an unexpected bonus, too: I’d expected a pitfall of the early start to be a lack of coffee at the finish line, but once I’d passed my three usual suspects for a post-run drink — Coffee #1, Chandos Deli, and Boston Tea Party — I stumbled across Caffe Nero, who open at 8am every Sunday. Not only were they open, they wished me a happy Valentine’s Day as soon as I walked in, which was a nice touch.

So, in the absence of any decent photos — it was a dull, grey dawn this morning — here’s some product placement. I think they deserve it :)

PS: I went out for a simple 5K on Wednesday, but didn’t have time to blog about it. But I’m keeping up the momentum, honest!