Submitted by Jon on Sun, 30/09/2007 – 9:35pm
Today I woke up late, and staggered downstairs slightly dazed and turned the tele on. On the tele were 50,000 runners preparing to start the Great North Run, which is possibly the world’s most popular half marathon. This gave me the motivation to go running again. However, not until after I had installed Webmin onto my home server, gone to town, walked along the river with my wife and son, searched the town for a child friendly place to drink that is not Costa (we ended up in Costa as usual), coming home, preparing dinner, eating dinner, putting my son to bed, falling asleep, and then waking again at 8.40pm. I then went for my first run since the 13th of September.
I ran the same route as on the 13th, which is the shortest route that I run. It took me 17:12min, which is a whole 3 minutes longer than I ran it in 17 days ago.
Good news is that my wrist is now better. It is still clicking whenever I move it (like my left knee) but it is not so painful. I can happily pick my son up without wincing with pain now, which is good.
So, I do plan to go to kick-boxing and kung-fu tomorrow. Hopefully my wrist is strong enough for some gentle punches and can support me for press ups (hopefully we won’t do many).
I am planning to start posting monthly photos of myself here, so that my progress is clearly visible to all my readers. I suggest that we all do this. This training log will become a story of my transformation from an overweight thirty-something to a super fit father that my son will be proud of!
I am feeling ready for my next weight training session too. I’ll report back on Tuesday with the start of the week’s progress.
Replies:
Dangling burgers
I too saw some of the GNR, and like you it made me think about starting running again. That is all I did though, think. I thought about several things: what sort of costume would one need to wear to get an interview with BBC? How many people are injured falling over discarded drinks bottles? Why does it take someone running 13 miles before people will give to charities?
But the main thing that I thought about was incentive. For me to start running, there has to be an incentive. Some kind of carrot. Or burger. I’m not talking financial incentive here, I don’t want someone to pay me to run. What I mean is that if I intended to enter a specific organised run, then it would motivate me into training for that run.
The last time that happened was when I entered the Southend half marathon in the late 90s. Prior to that, the furthest I had run was ten miles, but that was in a pair of rubbish trainers and I got bad blisters after five miles. By entering the 1/2 marathon, it gave me a purpose to run. It was a while ago now, but I think my training consisted of a few five mile runs, followed by a couple of ten mile runs. My overall level of fitness was better then than it is now, although it was in the post-Uni days (at Uni my fitness levels dropped in proportion to my weight gain). If I was to train for a half-marathon now, I would have to train for a much longer period of time.
So here’s what I should do. On Sunday 18th May, 2008, is the Great Baddow 10 mile charity run. That is seven months away. Surely that gives enough time to train? Or is it too far in the future? One thing is for certain, it provides me with that dangling burger to get me off my lazy backside.
JSparrow,
Fitness Freak
Friendly competition?
Hey, now that sounds like a challenge! Seeing that my runs are currently a maximum of 3 miles (if that) this will be a big challenge for me. But 7 months, 1 mile extra per month. That must be possible. I will start trying to increase endurance again. I was going for speed, in that I wanted to run a mile in 7 minutes (not real speed I know!) but maybe a charity run will be a good idea. And there can be some friendly competition here at Tranquilizer! In fact, maybe I will organise some T-shirts for us to wear! And publicize our work for charity here. Good idea JSparrow.
If you beat me, we can have a re-match, in a boxing ring. :)
Jon,
Freak.
Place your bets
Nothing like a bit of healthy competition to spur two burger eating snooker players into action. I should point out that there is also a 2 mile Great Baddow fun run on the same day, so if things don’t go to plan there is always a get out clause. Actually, I could have another get out clause. I may be on my way to the US on that day, but I won’t know that until next year.
Here’s a link to their website for last year’s race. There’s also a link to the course map. As you can see, it’s quite an undulating course, especially unusual for Essex. This means that any target time would have to consider this fact. I would say that 9 or 10 minute miles are the aim. 9 minute miles would give a finishing time of 1:30, which is doable. With seven months of training, it’s definitely doable.
On the entry form there is a space for a team name, but the team has to be AAA affiliated. Now if you could get Tranquiliser that status…..
JSparrow,
Fitness Freak of Nature