New Shoe Happiness

New Mizuno Wave Inspire 8

It has been pretty nippy in Bristol recently, though we escaped the blanket of snow that covered the majority of the country last week. It’s 2C outside right now, in the middle of the day, and I was told that there’s more cold weather on the way.

I took advantage of a slight gap in the weather on Sunday to wander out for a quick jog in my new shoes.

I didn’t go very far — after all, the last time I went running in a new model of Mizuno Wave Inspires, they gave me a blister, and I ended up limping home from Leigh Woods. So, learning from my mistake, I did a 5K that didn’t take me too far from home.

As it turned out, the Mizuno Wave Inspire 8s feel far nicer than the 7s did, and I agree with the nice man in Moti that they seem to be a return to the Wave Inspire’s previous good form. So, hopefully that’ll add some extra encouragement to get out and run, even if it is a bit nippy…

Matt Gets Walking

After two consecutive Christmas parties, I wasn’t feeling up for a run today. But when I finally drew the blinds and found out it was a lovely sunny day, I figured I should get some exercise. So I wandered out for a little walk that turned into 9K around Leigh Woods.

Not much to report, really, other than the fresh air did me good. Plus, as I wasn’t jogging, I got to bring out the big camera, so here are my snaps from the afternoon!

Saint Vincent's ParadeHIS CHARMED FOOTCivil TwilightCREATEThe MallSkyrideDuskCrowLeigh Woods DownLeigh Woods Up

The Joys of Working From Home

There’s no way I’d have been able to get out to the Avon Gorge for a lunchtime jog if I was still working my old day-job in town. Now I’m working from home, it’s a lot easier. And that’s particularly good at this time of year, because if you leave it much later than lunchtime, it tends to be dark.

So, yesterday I went out and took advantage of my new working patterns to fit in a little 5K plod down the Portway. It was clear, cold day, and it was lovely.

I’ll leave you with a photo taken from a couple of kilometres out of town 🙂

Ripples

Sunshine and Darkness

20111117 DSC02122Here’s a picture from last week’s jog, when I went out on Thursday, taking advantage of my new unemployed layabout freelance status by going for a 6K run around the Downs at lunchtime. It was a clear, fresh autumn-nearly-winter day, and I enjoyed the jog, mostly. Though I did drop back to a walk in a couple of places toward the end; just getting up Bridge Valley Road sapped a lot of my energy at the start of the run.

Tonight’s jog was chillier and darker, and was a simple 5K down the Portway. It was too dark for photography, which is a shame, because on my way back home I heard the flapping of large wings down by the water and looked across in time to see a heron come in to land on the bank of the Avon. I’ve seen them before on river trips up toward Avonmouth, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one as close to the city as I did tonight. Nice!

Neither run had many aches or pains, so I reckon getting out there a bit more frequently is definitely helping.

Anyway. Busy weekend coming up, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get out for a run much before Monday or Tuesday. Have a good weekend, whatever you’re doing. And take advantage of any sun that you can find!

Looking Back, Looking Forward

It was a lovely day for a jog in Bristol. I was a bit delayed getting started. I normally walk across the top of a lock gate on my walk to the start of the towpath, but this morning the lock gate was open to let a little batch of ships and rowing boats out onto the river. So, I watched that for a while, then snapped this picture from the other side once I’d crossed.

20110821 DSC01896

Then, after a 7K jog down the towpath and around Leigh Woods, I crossed over that lovely suspension bridge, and took a photo looking back on the lock.

This next picture is a scrollable panorama — if you scroll to the middle of it, you’ll just about see the lock gates to the side of the little island-like bit poking out in front of the three large red-brick warehouse buildings.

(The below picture is a scrollable panorama)

20110821 DSC01923

I like these backwards-and-forwards pictures. They really give an impression of how far I’ve jogged, and, in this case, how high I climbed.

Talking about this jog with Jose — who passed me going the other way on his much longer long run — prompted me to check my headline RunKeeper stats, which led me to two interesting discoveries.

First, while I moan about having put weight on recently, imagine how much lardier I’d be if I hadn’t burned off 106,953 calories since I started recording my running, in September 2009. 106,953 calories. That’s a lot of latte and cake.

Second, in the last two years, I’ve run 974km. Nine hundred and seventy four kilometres. Which means that, all being well, as long as I get in just 5K more practice between now and the Bristol Half Marathon, completing the race will take me through the 1,000km mark. One million metres of running.

So, while I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself recently, I’ve got a lot of jogging done since I started, and that’s something I can be proud of. And there’s still milestones to come. Well, what with me being all European, I guess there are still kilometrestones to come, technically, but you know what I mean…

I’ll try to get out for 5K this week. Then I’ve a week of holiday, where I’ll probably be hill-walking rather than jogging, but I should be back to the normal routine after that. See you soon!

Up With the Seagull

IMG 2511 copyI would title this entry “up with the lark”, but I don’t actually know what a lark looks like. If there were any larks in Bristol, the seagulls would probably have eaten them by now.

This time yesterday I was still in bed, having a long, lounging Saturday morning lie-in. So it was a bit of a wrench to get out of bed early today, drag my kit on and run 4K. But that’s exactly what I did, and I feel virtuous now, bordering on smug.

Okay, so it was only 4K, but it was the first run in ages that hasn’t involved illness or defective shoes or some other problem. And it went fine. I’m going to try to get a couple more of those under my belt this week.

My main motivation for getting out early was the surprisingly glorious bank holiday weather, which seems to be defying UK stereotypes by staying bright and hot and sunny for days on end. Certainly it’s not the kind of weather where I’d want to get out at my usual Sunday running hour and bake in the midday heat…

On that note, I think it may be time for some spring cleaning, and maybe a spot of gardening. It’s that kind of day…

Grump

Bluebells in Leigh Woods

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. But those are about the only good things. And now I’m grumpy.

I started off running feeling okay-ish. It’d been a while, because of my recent bout of flu, but I mostly seem to be over that; even the residual cough is far less enthusiastic now. But I wasn’t feeling 100%.

I wasn’t helped by RunKeeper (or, perhaps more charitably to RunKeeper, maybe the GPS on my iPhone) having one of its occasional “funny five minutes”. I realised something was going a bit odd when I got the “you’ve run four kilometres” voice prompt really very soon after the 3km voice prompt. Then, thirty seconds or so later, RunKeeper told me I’d got to 5km, and that I was averaging 4 minutes per kilometre. That’s about 15kph, or, to put it another way, significantly faster than I’ve ever run.

So, my RunKeeper log of today’s run is pretty screwed.

Worse was to come. At somewhere around the real 5km mark, I realised my shiny new Mizuno Wave Inspire 7s were giving me a blister. One bit of the right shoe, in the instep, seemed to be rubbing a bit.

I carried on for another half a kilometre or so, then had to start walking. No sense in making things worse, I figured.

So, basically I gave up and limped back across the bridge to Clifton Village, and now I’ve got to see if I can send these shoes back. Annoyingly, this is the first pair of running shoes I bought from the internet, rather than in lovely local shop Moti. D’oh.

So, that’s my joy of running today. Better get out there again soon, and probably in my old, reliable — if slightly worn down — shoes. I don’t want to have running associated too much in my mind with pain and grumpiness. Bah.

Getting Out There

7048257f8fc1413c852bc886040aba1e 7 copyDespite being robbed of an hour in bed by the clocks going forward, I still managed to get out and do a 7.5K out along the towpath, through Leigh Woods, and back to the Suspension Bridge this morning. It was a nice day for a jog; cool but not cold, and rain-free. It’s been a bit hazy in Bristol these last two days, as you can see from this little Instagram snap from my walking warm-up.

However, I did have a couple of pauses in today’s run. One was accidental, and involved stepping on a rock that had passed under my “trip hazard” radar, but that was minor. The other was me running out of breath halfway up the hill into Leigh Woods. I guess this means my aerobic capacity still isn’t back up to what it was before I took December off.

This is partly because I’m still not back in the habit of weekday running, I reckon. This is a mostly psychological problem, I think, especially as we’re now into the season of longer days and warmer weather. So, this week, I’m gong to go running on Wednesday evening. I figure nominating a day in advance will help. Also, having a low bar to start with might also encourage me out, so I’m only going to do 3K. That sounds so easy that hopefully it’ll still sound easy on Wednesday evening after a tiring day at work…

On the weight front, things seem to be going well. It’s hard to tell for sure, though, as it’s only been a couple of weeks, and my weight can vary so much from day to day. But it looks like the overall trend is downwards. I guess I’ll know for sure after a couple more weeks…

Anyway. Nothing else to report. Enjoy the warmer weather if you’re getting it!

Weighty Matters

 

Avon Gorge, from Sea Wall
Avon Gorge, today 🙂

I’ve been taking it easy since the Bath Half, giving myself some recovery time, though I did manage to wander out for a 5K last Sunday, and a 5K today, too.

But my thoughts recently have been more on eating than on exercise. Because, despite taking up jogging, my weight has been remarkably static. Checking back to some numbers I captured on Skinnyr.com in August 2009, pretty much when I took up jogging, I can reveal the massive effect one and a half years of regular exercise has had on me: I have put on a pound.

A single, solitary pound. That’s the difference between my weight now and my weight back then. And not only that, but it’s a pound in the wrong direction.

So, yet again, I think I need to concentrate on my eating for a bit. The exercise is definitely doing me good, and I’m a lot fitter than I would have been without it, but at over seventeen stone, I clearly need to lose a bit of weight by adding some calorie control as well.

Being a geek, I have, of course, started off my diet by purchasing technology. I’ve bought a Withings Body Scale, a Wi-Fi-connected scale that will record, graph and share your weight. If you look over to the sidebar of this blog, in fact, you’ll see a (slightly ugly, sadly) weight widget that has probably got a pretty recent reading on it — which was sent directly here from my shiny new bathroom scale, a few seconds after I last stepped on it.

If you want to know more about the Withings, I’ve written a detailed review on my more geeky blog, here.

Also on the technological side, as suggested by my friends Hal and Rowly, I’m using MyFitnessPal.com to record my meals and stay below a set calorie limit.

My plan is to drop half a stone before the Bristol 10K in May, which should (a) be a realistic target, and (b) make sure I don’t feel quite so lardy as I plod around Bristol in front of hundreds of onlookers.

I’ll probably be trying to get out for at least a couple of runs a week from now on, just because the weather’s getting nicer — it was definitely Spring today! — and it’s lighter in the evenings, and I’ll just tag occasional progress reports on my weight onto the end of my normal “I’ve been for a jog” posts. And we’ll see how I do! Wish me luck…

Sad Santas

I was a Sad Santa on Sunday.

Sad Santas
As were these other people. We’d all made our way to the Lloyds Amphitheatre to take part in Santas on the Run, a 2K charity fun run for the South West Children’s Hospice. As you’ll have worked out, the idea is for everyone to dress as Santa for the run, and apparently more than 500 people had signed up for the event. Some kind people had already contributed on my Just Giving page, I’d collected some sponsorship at work, and I’d tipped off the local paparazzi. Well, I’d mentioned it on the Bristol Flickr group’s discussion board, anyway…

I did have some reservations on the walk down to the start, though. And yes, I did walk a mile down the Hotwell Road at 10am on a Sunday morning dressed in a Santa costume. There was hooting involved. And some occasional pointing. Not to mention half the police in the South West driving past on their way to their afternoon’s student demo (my pics of that here) crowd control duties. That was a bit odd.

But my reservations were mainly about traction. It had been a bloody cold night after quite a rainy Saturday, and the ground was icy everywhere. It was also so foggy you could barely see the other side of the harbour. “On way down to register for #santasontherun,” I tweeted. “Hope they’ve gritted the route, or it’ll be Santas on their backside instead.”

The lack of Santas when I got to the Amphitheatre was a clue, and my suspicions were confirmed by a couple of the organisers greeting me with disappointed faces and the news that the route was just too icy to be safe. The Amphitheatre itself had pretty much been a skating rink when they arrived to set up, and the rest of the route — especially Pero’s Bridge, often a curve of slippery metal in Winter — were still un-runnable.

So, I and the other Santas who’d not heard the cancellation announcements on local radio headed off across Millennium Square, pictured above, to the kind, warm interior of The Living Room, a fashionable and lovely bar who gave a free hot drink to anyone in a Santa suit that morning — thank you!

After a commiseration drink with my friend José, who’d come along to support me, I drifted back home, still be-Santa-suited, and still garnering the odd confused look and occasional cheery hoot.

There is some good news, though — I heard from Children’s Hospice yesterday, and they’re rearranging the run for January 23rd! So, odd though it will be to be dressed as a Santa nearly a month after Christmas, I’ll at least get the chance to do something surreal and, more to the point, give my various sponsors the run that I owe them 🙂

So, thank you, kind sponsors, for sponsoring me, and rest assured I still intend to run 2K as Santa, no matter what time of year it is when it’s finally safe to run!