Matt Gets Running

Like I said in my last update, I fan­cied get­ting out for a nice long run this week­end, and this morn­ing I made good on that. I ran from home, out along the tow­path under the Sus­pen­sion Bridge, all the way to the far entrance to Leigh Woods, then up into the for­est. I did a […]

Yup, as you can see by the scene behind the scary, wonky-sunglassed weirdo in the pic­ture, it was a really nice day today. And I went on a route through Leigh Woods, which was gor­geous. Not con­tent with doing the 8K through the woods like I did last time, going out along the tow­path, up […]

No per­sonal best for the 5K this evening — that still remains at the just-under-31 min­utes I man­aged back in Novem­ber, run­ning as fast as I sus­tain­ably could all the way. But tonight, I think, was the fastest since then, at 32:26. And con­sid­er­ing I did a nor­mal jog on the way out, then just did […]

Okay, back on the road again tonight after my birth­day break. Tonight I tried a bit of speed­work, doing some fartlek train­ing where I sprinted a bit and then recov­ered for a while at nor­mal pace, sprinted again, and so on. I trav­elled out down the Port­way as nor­mal, because every­one seems to say that warming […]

Def­i­nite rule of run­ning: once you’ve done a dis­tance once, it’s a lot eas­ier, psy­cho­log­i­cally, to do it again. Today I was feel­ing pretty good, and I’d had a decent night’s sleep, and the weather looked okay, so I decided to do 10K again. And here it is on RunKeeper.com. It was actu­ally 10.42km, about the […]

…well, deep pud­dles, any­way. I want to push my week­day runs out a bit fur­ther, so I fig­ured I’d do 6K this evening. It var­ied between driz­zle and out­right rain, but it was still good. I felt fine, and kept up a nice pace. About the only thing that wasn’t great were my calves/ankles, and […]

I don’t know when this week became the week to push and to prove myself. But appar­ently it did. I should have got out run­ning last night, but I was knack­ered after work, so I did what any brave and stout young fel­low would have done: gave up on the idea and went to bed early. This […]

See­ing my friend Bert’s tweet ear­lier on got me think­ing. I have gen­er­ally been going for endurance rather than speed, espe­cially recently. Also in my mind was my friend Bananza’s advice that “if it’s easy, you’re not work­ing hard enough”. So, tonight I I mixed things up a bit. I fig­ured it’d do me good […]

…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, […]

This morn­ing I had a bit of an acci­dent. My gen­eral plan was to skip the run­ning last night, and instead go out this morn­ing, as I’ve found my last few Sat­ur­days have been low-energy, wasted days, and I thought I’d see if start­ing with a run would help pick me up a bit. So, I […]