Matt Gets Running

Run-Up to the 2011 Bristol 10K

It has not been a brilliant run-up to the Bristol 10K. I feel pretty good, mind you, and I’m sure there’ll be no problem doing it. But I’d had hopes of losing more weight (I’ve plateaued since I was ill a few weeks ago. I’m well now, just not back on the wagon.) And I should have run a bit more, recently.

I would say that things keep on getting in the way, but let’s face it, a quick practice run takes about 40 minutes, and I’m sure I’ve had more than 40 minutes of extra spare time in the last few weeks. I need to work on that, and figure out what’s going on. And practice getting back on the diet wagon when I fall off, too. Bah.

Anyway. The Bristol 10K. It’s this Sunday! I’ve just kicked off my donations page at Just Giving, which you can find here if you’d like to help the lovely people at St. Peter’s Hospice. And my day-job employers have very kindly agreed to match the money I raise, up to a maximum total of £250, so at the moment, anything you give counts double 🙂

My aims for this year? Well, I’d like to beat last year’s time. I’m not sure how realistic that is, as I don’t seem to have got much faster over the last year, but it’s good to have an aim, isn’t it? Last year’s time was 1 hour, 9 minutes and 28 seconds, so anything faster than that will probably make me happy.

I’ll almost certainly be running with RunKeeper, so you can track me as I go around, if you’re interested. I’ll be starting some time between 9:45 and 10am, and you should be able to see a red dot moving around a map of Bristol on my RunKeeper profile page between then and whenever I finally stagger over the finish line.

I’m sure I’ll post an update here after the event, so — more to follow on Sunday!

New Toy

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 — seemed like a good choice.

So, it being bonus month, I decided to treat myself. This little GPS watch seems to work fine, though I’d probably be happier with the vibrating alert offered by pricier models than with the quiet beeping from the 305, which means I can’t really run with music if I want to pay attention to its alerts.

But mostly, I bought it for the heart rate monitor, so I’ll probably run with this recording my position and heart rate, but with RunKeeper telling me what to do through my headphones while I’m doing a training session.

The web upload to the RunKeeper site is great, too. Thanks to a browser plugin, there’s no fiddling around with exporting files, or any of that annoyance. You just plug the 305 into its little docking station, go to the RunKeeper site, and choose which track from the watch you want to upload, straight from your web browser. Nice.

So, if you look at my latest track on RunKeeper, you’ll see a third line, for heart rate, has joined the elevation and pace tracks in the graph at the bottom.

Now, of course, I’ve got to do a bit of reading up about heart rate-based training…

If you’re in the UK, enjoy the nice weather and tomorrow’s bank holiday! I’ll catch you later on in the week…

Midweek

Hurrah! Actually managed to get out and do a midweek run. Nothing thrilling, just a dusk run along the Portway and back. But getting out on a weeknight is good, and hopefully I can do it again next week and start getting back into the habit of them.

Anyway. I’d best go and stretch, and then get some food inside me! See you all on the other side of the Royal Wedding…

Up With the Seagull

IMG 2511 copy I 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.

Not Running, but Walking

It has been a crap weekend. I took Friday off to give myself some extra time for getting stuff done this weekend. Then on Friday I was ill, strangely feverish, and feeling really weird. That ended up in insomnia which kept me awake until about 3am on Saturday. Saturday I finally woke up at about 11am with a headache.

By Saturday evening I wasn’t feeling too bad. But it was really too late to do anything much, so I just went to bed. This time I fell asleep pretty easily. And woke up at about 11am today, Sunday, with a headache.

At that point I decided that running probably wasn’t on the agenda. Pounding the pavement with a pounding head is just a bad idea. But by the afternoon I was feeling like I could actually use some exercise, so I went shopping — only I went on foot, which ended up as an 8km shopping expedition, which according to RunKeeper at least burned off 786 calories…

I’m still feeling a bit rubbish, but at least I got out there and got some fresh air. I still haven’t really worked out what’s wrong with me — I seem to have developed a bit of a cough to go with my headache — but I’m hoping it’s just some passing bug that I’ll shake off soon. Especially as I still have to get all that stuff done…

Balancing Act

I’ve got a problem at work. Well, okay, I have several problems at work, including the irritating fact I have to go there every day. But the problem I want to share today is the Problem of the Spare Desk.

Since our team moved floors a couple of months ago, I’ve had to sit next to the aforementioned spare desk. If you’ve not sat next to a spare desk before, here’s a picture of what they look like most of the time. Because pretty much every day, someone has a birthday, or is holding a bake sale for charity, or just feels like cheering people up because it’s Monday. Or because it’s Friday. Or because there’s a vowel in the month, or whatever.

And these things are all celebrated with calorie-dense, vitamin-free foods, all of which get put on the spare desk, of course. Today it’s Dan’s birthday and here are his doughnuts, shortbread, crisps, Haribo, rocky road, cocktail sausages, Oreos, cream cakes, and so on.

And I’ve had to sit next to the bloody things all day. While carrying on bravely with my diet.

I don’t think I ended up too many calories up, despite caving in to temptation in the afternoon. I didn’t buy lunch today, swapping it for occasional sugar-based grazing from the empty desk. And then this evening I ran 4K down the towpath. Hopefully, as well as starting to re-form the habit of weekday running, the 523 calories RunKeeper says I burned should cancel out quite a few shortbread biscuits.

So, on the whole, I think I got away with it.

But the next time our office has a re-shuffle, remind me to bribe the floor-planner, will you? I think that spare desks should only be put next to those irritating skinny people who can eat fifteen doughnuts a day without putting on an ounce.

Getting Out There

7048257f8fc1413c852bc886040aba1e 7 copy Despite 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…

Charridy Update

A very heartfelt thanks to everyone who sponsored my Bath Half run. The RNLI are a great cause, and they need all the donations they can get.

All in all, you donated £120 at my Just Giving page. My employer kindly matched those donations, and with that, plus the Gift Aid that can be claimed back from UK personal tax payers, minus Just Giving’s 5% fee, I think the grand total for the RNLI works out at £252.75, which is fab!

As for me, I’ll be off for a jog this weekend, and will probably be posting about a Cunning Plan I have to lose some weight before the Bristol 10K rolls around in May, and about a related gadget I just bought…

“Thank you” image by woodleywonderworks, as created by Wordle.