Matt Gets Running

I’ve been feel­ing bet­ter this week. It’s pleas­ant, when you wake up in the morn­ing and think, “Wow! I don’t feel like utter crap!”

This week I decided in advance that I’d go out on Thursday, just because I wanted to pick a day and stick to it. And not wait until the last minute, like I did last week. So this morn­ing, I put on my jog­ging clothes first thing, as a hint to myself, though I’m work­ing from home and had a Skype meet­ing at 9am, so I couldn’t go out straight away.

But, with the morning’s work behind me, I finally grabbed my water bottle, got out the door and did a simple, slow 5K. Don’t pay too much atten­tion to the awful time, not only does that include a lot of elev­a­tion but also ten minutes of warm up/cool down walk­ing. So I’m not too unhappy.

And it got me out of the house, and into Clifton Vil­lage for some shop­ping and some lunch. Broke up the otherwise-insular home work­ing nicely, anyway.

Next run? Maybe at the week­end. We’ll see.

After my “very achiev­able” res­ol­u­tion to get run­ning once a week in Janu­ary, I only just squeaked the first run into the first week. Yes­ter­day — on the 7th Janu­ary! — I finally got around to run­ning.

In my defence, I was still feel­ing ill for the first part of the week, plus the weather’s not exactly been con­du­cive. But given that I woke up with a head­ache yes­ter­day morn­ing and felt rub­bish all day, and then had to force myself out for a run because it was the end of the week, maybe I should have braved the wind and gone out earlier.

So — les­son for next week: don’t wait until the weather’s nice and you’re feel­ing great. It might not happen…

I’m ill. Which is fine. I’d spe­cific­ally planned to do bugger-all dur­ing the period between Christ­mas and New Year, and if you’re going to loaf about unshaven for a few days, you might as well fit a cold in while you do it.

It helps that — so far — it’s just a reg­u­lar winter lurgy of a sore throat and a run-down feel­ing, not hideous full-blown flu. Hope­fully it won’t get too much worse, or last more than a few days. And the enforced slow­ing down gives me a chance to reflect on my run­ning, my gen­eral fit­ness, and my plans for the year ahead.

Like many, I think about res­ol­u­tions at this time of year. Last week, I was at Ave­bury for the Winter Sol­stice, there for the dawn, to see in the turn­ing point toward longer days. It seems a good time for look­ing for­ward as well as back.

But you have to be care­ful about res­ol­u­tions. As Mer­lin Mann observed in the latest Back to Work pod­cast, people tend to be a little bin­ary about new year’s res­ol­u­tions. And it’s pos­sible that that’s espe­cially true of pro­gram­mers, like myself. “I’ll run three times a week”, I think to myself, “Just like I used to.”

But how real­istic is that? To go from — given my last few weeks’ record — no runs a week, straight to three? And how much of a fall am I set­ting myself up for if I don’t do three runs a week in the first week of Janu­ary? If I haven’t done three runs a week, then my resolution’s “failed”, and there’s always that tend­ency to think, “well, I might as well give up, then.” Failed or suc­ceeded, true or false: bin­ary thinking.

Also, how real­istic am I being about my past per­form­ance? Well, luck­ily, I have RunKeeper’s “Fit­ness­Re­ports” fea­ture, so I can eas­ily check. In 2010, a good year for run­ning for me, I actu­ally only aver­aged 1.3 runs per week. And that was a good year. So my ini­tial “I used to do three runs a week” was, in fact, utter rub­bish. Sure, there were some weeks where I did three runs, but not many. I think nos­tal­gia has me men­tally inflat­ing how “good” I used to be.

So, what to do instead?

The ques­tion seems to be answer­ing itself. I resolve to run every week in Janu­ary. At least once. Just to get myself star­ted again. That’ll be more runs in a month than I’ve man­aged for ages, but still sounds very achiev­able. And if I don’t man­age that, I won’t count myself a fail­ure, either. I’ll just look into why I didn’t man­age it, for­give myself, and fig­ure out a way to keep trying.

And I’m not going to worry about the weight, yet. You can eas­ily cram too many res­ol­u­tions into a new year, spread­ing your­self too thinly across all of them. I’ll have a think about the weight and my eat­ing pat­terns when we get to Feb­ru­ary. For now, I’m just going to run.

How about you? Got any res­ol­u­tions? How real­istic are they? Do you have any hard evid­ence that you’ve ever been as “good” as you’re plan­ning to be? (Look­ing back at my own records sur­prised me!) And are you set­ting your­self up for that “oh, I didn’t man­age this exact goal, so there’s no point in car­ry­ing on try­ing” moment?

Or are you pre­pared to for­give your­self and make adjust­ments as you go along?

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!

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

Here’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!

After the aches and pains of Thursday, yesterday’s jog through Leigh Woods was very pleas­ant. While it was hard work in places, it was the right kind of hard work, the kind of hard work that left me stand­ing at the tops of hills pant­ing until I’d recovered, rather than the kind of hard work that had me run­ning along the flat frown­ing while won­der­ing why my hip was aching so much.

I also got out early enough to snap the sun just rising over the Sus­pen­sion Bridge. There are lim­ited vant­age points with a good view of the bridge from the towpath, so I figured I’d try a dif­fer­ent kind of shot, this one through some bare Autumn branches, to try to get some­thing a bit less “same-y”. I think it worked quite nicely.

I didn’t jog last week­end, but instead went for a nice walk in Leigh Woods with my friend Emmeline. I love run­ning in the woods, but it made a pleas­ant change hav­ing some com­pany and going slow enough to carry the big cam­era around.

I did get out for a mid-week jog, a 5K down the Port­way on Thursday. And it was pretty hor­rible, to be hon­est. I was achey and slow and really not up for it. Even though it was only 5K, I felt like I had to walk a couple of times on the way back. Body and mind were just not up for it.

Here’s some hope, though; a report from my friend Jose on his latest run:

Monday saw the only my fourth run of the last eight weeks, and boy, was I creaky. The first couple of miles hurt, no doubt about that, but then… then the muscles and bones and bits of car­til­age and lungs and all other asso­ci­ated hanging together bits remembered how it all went and everything fell into place. Those fol­low­ing two and half miles were much, much bet­ter. I’m not there yet, I need to run and run and run, but that lovely feel­ing of being able to run 18 miles in one go will return. Eventually.

My hope, spe­cific­ally, being that I’ve just not been run­ning often enough nor far enough recently, and that if I get out and stretch my cur­rent lim­its a bit, maybe I’ll work through the aches and pains a bit — break through the creak­i­ness bar­rier — and start feel­ing good for more of my running.

I’m going to try to get out for a long, slow run today or tomor­row; it looks like we’ve got pretty good weather lined up for most of the week­end, so I should take advant­age of it…

So, I went to Crete for a week, and then took another week off jog­ging. Still, I hit the road again today, and I’m glad I did. I hadn’t planned on a morn­ing run today, but it was a lovely morn­ing, and I just felt the urge to be out there in the sunshine.

I did a plod­ding 5K down the towpath on the south of the Avon. Great weather, lovely clouds in the sky — as you can see from this pic­ture that I snapped on the return leg — and des­pite my recent lack of train­ing, I didn’t feel too bad.

All in all, a good jog. Shame Run­Keeper crashed between kilo­metres 1 and 2, but I was using the Garmin Fore­run­ner as a backup, so I still man­aged to get a decent log.

Hope­fully I can start ramp­ing back up to at least a couple of runs a week now.

Today I woke up tired and with a head­ache, after a bad night’s sleep. Oddly, though, I still felt the urge to go out for my first jog since the Bris­tol Half. I’ve been mean­ing to get back out pound­ing the streets for a couple of weeks now, but my change in routine — I quit my day job — seemed to hinder that, rather than help­ing it.

As you might expect, for the first jog in weeks when I was tired and headachy, it didn’t go that well. I wanted to nip up to Clifton Vil­lage and get some lunch, so I went up Bridge Val­ley Road (now fully open again after being closed to traffic, and occa­sion­ally even ped­es­tri­ans, for many months.) This was clearly too much of a chal­lenge for my unhappy body and brain, so after plod­ding all the way up the hill I was pretty exhausted. I slowed to a walk for a while to recover, then picked up the pace again, then dropped back to a walk.

I was also a bit annoyed by Run­Keeper. Some releases ago, Run­Keeper just seems to have stopped being able to keep a good GPS lock. It doesn’t seem to be related to my phone, because (a) I star­ted with the phone that worked fine with Run­Keeper for years, and (b) because of a head­phone con­nector prob­lem, I’ve just had my phone replaced by Apple for a new one, and Run­Keeper isn’t work­ing prop­erly on the new one, either.

Today, Run­Keeper was com­pletely rub­bish at track­ing me, and by the end of my 5K run, had recor­ded me doing a ran­dom 7.5K track with lots of ran­dom spikes out to the sides of my real route, and an aver­age pace of under 3min/km — I wish!

Luck­ily, my Garmin Fore­run­ner 305 always seems to be beau­ti­fully accur­ate — I guess the GPS hard­ware is simply bet­ter than in the iPhone — so I’ve just been upload­ing tracks from that to replace the rub­bish RunKeeper-recorded ones (here’s today’s). It’s a shame I can’t rely on Run­Keeper any more to give me voice prompts (like telling me when to turn around if I’m halfway through a jog down the Port­way), though.

Maybe the GPS is bet­ter in the iPhone 4S, which I’m hop­ing to upgrade to at some point soon…