Matt Gets Running

I took a new toy out run­ning with me last night. I’ve been think­ing about get­ting a heart rate mon­itor for a while now, and when I found out that Run­Keeper lets you eas­ily throw Garmin devices’ data at their web­site, the Garmin Fore­run­ner 305 — cur­rently on offer for around £110 on Amazon UK […]

I’ll start off with a nice happy pic­ture, just to show that some of today’s run was quite pleas­ant. These are a few of the mil­lions of blue­bells cur­rently car­pet­ing Leigh Woods, which makes the woods even nicer than usual for jog­ging. And it was also a nice sunny day, as you can prob­ably tell. […]

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 […]

So, picked up my new shoes on Fri­day — Mizuno Wave Inspire 6es — and walked lots in them yes­ter­day to make sure they felt all right, and that noth­ing was rub­bing. And they were fine, so today I went out into the gor­geous Spring sun­shine and did a simple 5-and-a-bit-K, just around half the […]

As you know, I’ve been hav­ing prob­lems with my hip — well, in fact my hip and the top bit of my left-hand glu­teal muscle, or “upper arse”, as I believe it’s tech­nic­ally known. I reckon it may be down to shoes, so yes­ter­day I went shop­ping. In Moti, the advice was basic­ally, “well, if […]

That was really hard work. All I did was my nor­mal week­day 5K, but I just felt com­pletely energy­less. Hmph. And my hip’s aching again. 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. […]

Run­ning is pretty simple, as sports go. There’s not a lot of sexy equip­ment. So far, I’ve got away with some good shoes, some socks, some shorts, and a top or two. But I added a com­plic­a­tion at the week­end. My cheap Puma sport socks were a bit rub­bish, espe­cially if it had been rain­ing and […]

I did some­thing unusual today: got out first thing in the morn­ing for a run. I man­aged it — just a stand­ard 5K along my old towpath route — but I wasn’t really feel­ing the love. I don’t know whether that’s because I’m not used to jog­ging at 9am, or whether it’s just because I was […]

I’ve decided what my reward’s going to be for get­ting to the end of the C25K. I’ve been need­ing a new com­pact cam­era for a while now. My ven­er­able Konica-Minolta DiM­age X-60 was a good first digital cam­era, but it’s now battered, bruised and lack­ing in bat­tery staying-power. Not only that, but at 5 megapixels […]