Wednesday Today, without a care in the world, I set off on a sunny seafront jog that would lengthen my runs further. Yesterday it was 2 x 10 minutes. Today I was pushing that to 12 and 8-minutes. The 12 went well. I walked for three minutes and set off on the 8. Just over halfway through, it happened. The ping.A sudden sharp pain in my right calf. I pulled up immediately and sat on a bench dedicated to someone who liked to sit there gazing at the view. I too felt all at sea. How can this have happened without warning? But then I recalled what I wrote just seven days ago: “The final 2-minute stretch was supposed to … …
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Two quite contrasting days to report. Yesterday, the running day, was another bleak and bitingly blustery chug along the empty seafront. Cheerless and forlorn, it seemed like a quite unnecessary voluntary torment while I was out there. But the dutiful deed got done, and afterwards, as always, I was pleased I’d stuck to the plan. Talking of plans, the estimable Tom Roper mentioned on the group Facebook page that his personal fitness guru had recommended moving from 5K to10K by increasing long runs by 500K every three weeks. There’s mileage, as it were, in this idea. I’d already been mulling over the fact that both the 5K and 10K plans I have in my spreadsheet deal only in minutes of … …
This step back into winter is just not funny any more. Should long, baking hot summer days ever become fashionable again here, I’m sure the cooling breeze off the Channel will be a good thing but in wintry times, these same maritime gusts mean another layer of pain, and I heartily disapprove of them. While the more sensible folk of Eastbourne were wrapped up like Michelin men, the blank-faced joggers were chugging along in their own icy little worlds, wondering what the hell they thought they were thinking of when they opted to set off from their centrally heated homes. That’s how it felt to me, anyway. But I got through it — my 5-minute and two 8-minute runs, each … …
A long and busy day for a retiree, starting with a trip to the seafront for Week 5 Day 2 of the programme. A time will come when I run down to the sea, but that time hasn’t yet arrived. Although the English Channel is visible from the upper storeys of my residence, it’s just too far to bother getting there on foot at the moment. Google Maps reckons it’s a 30 minute walk but I’m sure there are faster routes, employing the warren of alleyways and shortcuts which I’m currently unaware of, but which I’m sure must exist. So I drove down and parked on a residential road by the front, then strode off for a 5-minute warm-up walk … …
Week 5 starts with a departure from the C25K script. The stipulated R5m, W3m, R6m, W3m, R5m was what I managed on Sunday, two days ago, and two days earlier than scheduled. I could have repeated it but craved some sense of making progress so I wrote my own prescription of R3m, W2m, R5m, W2m, R7m, W3m, R3m, W3m, R2m, amounting to a whopping 20 minutes of purposeful, confident, sinewy, seagull-scattering galloping down the Promenade. Or so my turbulent imagination would like to have it. The truth was less alarming and less disruptive to all creatures of the seafront, both human and avian. Apart from the ever-wary dope smokers, all remained unperturbed, even insouciant, as I briefly flickered through their … …
Crikey. End of week 4 already. Further than I’ve got before on this programme. And plenty of enthusiasm still in the tank according to my dispositional dipstick. Friday: Arrived at the seafront at about 11 and parked by the Treasure Island Theme Park. I’ve never entered this entertainment facility as I’m baffled by the description given on its website. It boasts of combining “an indoor soft play area on 2 levels with slides, zip lines & lots of other fun” with a “pirate-themed 18-hole miniature golf course”. What’s the target audience here — precocious tots who might fancy a round of golf after a session in the soft play area? Or senile oldies who might want to retreat into … …
Retirement is by far the best job I’ve ever had. The hours are formidable but the duties are varied and not too onerous. The pay could be better but I make do. I’m living the dream. Men on YouTube with manicured grey beards gaze out at me with gimlet eyes and prattle on about time, health and money being life’s golden triangle. The vital ingredients for opportunity, even happiness. I don’t much like these glib formulas, especially when I didn’t think of them first, but there might just be something in this one. At a rough average, the 10 or 15 years after retirement seem to be the time to get stuff done. For my wife that means travelling to … …
Rambling round the ‘hood in recent days, I see more heartening evidence that spring is just around the corner. One of those refreshing, cold-but-sunny mornings yesterday proved ideal for a pre-match stroll past the daffodil-lined front gardens and into the deserted cemetery on the hillside. I’d not describe Ocklynge as a riot of colour at the best of times but the signs are there, with buds erupting on the shrubs and leaves starting to unfurl. The great sense of optimism that the season represents was consolidated later in the afternoon when Brighton won at Newcastle to push them into the quarter-finals of the FA Cup. Cemeteries too are strangely cheerful places. They may seem like an obvious intimation of mortality, … …
Yesterday’s C25K instalment took me to Hampden Park. Not the celebrated Glasgow football stadium but the more modest patch of greenery in Eastbourne’s northern territories. It was uneventful. A dog peered at me suspiciously, as if I was some sort of weirdo — a bit rich, I thought, for a Bedlington Terrier. I saw a couple of squirrels and some truanting schoolboys smoking weed. I listened to part of an audiobook called the Slow AF Running Club. The cartoonish author, Martinus Evans, tells us he’s ‘a badass on a badass journey’ which, as an English speaker, I didn’t find very illuminating. But he’s essentially a large fat man — even fatter than me — who embarked on his running odyssey … …
There’s nothing like a war memorial to stop me in my tracks. Late this afternoon, en route for Holywell, at the end of the seafront, I drove through Meads, along an unfamiliar road, and happened across a great arch that was once the entrance to St Vincent’s School and later, evidently, a war memorial. Situated in a quiet suburban road, the archway was so visually arresting that I felt compelled to stop and investigate. The inscription reads: In memory of 49 gallant men who were at school here in their early boyhood and gave their lives in the service of their country during the Great War of 1914-19. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we … …