A day so dismal that I went to the local cemetery to cheer up. Ocklynge is a remarkable location and handy for a walk or casual plod when I don’t have the time, the inclination, or the emotional buoyancy to head for the seafront. It was here, this afternoon, that I executed my Week 2 Day 1 C25K duty. Week 2 means the running spells have rocketed by 50%, to 1.5 minutes, but there are just 6 of them rather than the previous 8. So the total scuttling element has eased upwards from 8 to 9 minutes. By way of compensation, the walking intervals have expanded to a leisurely 2 minutes.… READ MORE.... …
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There weren’t too many things I missed about England when I lived in Switzerland. Proper beer, proper football, proper fish and chips of course. And the sea. Switzerland is well-equipped with most of life’s heart-stirring natural essentials like mountains and lakes and waterfalls and magnificent hiking routes. But a coastline is one item someone left off the list, and this helps me appreciate it more now. Today’s C25K Week 1 Day 3 jaunt was another coastal venture. Despite the blustery conditions, being a Saturday meant having to share the seafront path with plenty of other outdoor enthusiasts: fellow red-faced, plump plodders, proper polished runners, dutiful dog-walkers, kids on scooters, cyclists, and wretched looking, dripping swimmers.… READ MORE.... …
The lobby thermometer inside my house reckoned it was 4ºC early this afternoon so the seafront must have been hovering somewhere below freezing. I may have to rethink these coastal plods. Or is it that there’s no such thing as the wrong weather for a cold coastal jaunt, only the wrong clothes for a cold coastal jaunt? There’s an awkward relationship between insulation and mobility which explains why, outside the London Marathon, you don’t see many runners dressed in thermal 4-layer polar expedition outerwear. Being uncharacteristically practical, it’s probably helpful to reconceive what I’m really doing here. Instead of trying to fool myself, and certainly anyone reading this, that I’m going for a run, it would more accurate to describe my current activity level as spirited walking with a few odd moments of jogging thrown in for variety.… READ MORE.... …
My neighbourhood WhatsApp group announced today a local weekly session of gentle stretching and movement for ‘older residents’. When I realised they were including me in that decaying demographic, I knew it was time to act. With a sense of outrage and defiance, I would seize the exercise nettle myself. The resulting experience, a sort of run along Eastbourne seafront, was joyous. This coastal venture wasn’t as spontaneous as I’m pretending. The notion of trying to re-enter the plodosphere, more than 11 years after the 2013 Berlin Marathon, my last serious athletic endeavour [it was the event that was serious, not so much my six-hour effort], has been brewing for a long time.… READ MORE.... …
Having nothing worthwhile to write about is a good reason to keep away from the page, though it’s a rule of thumb ignored by many, including most newspaper columnists. Another reason for writing paralysis, and the one that applies to me, is the opposite — a mumble mountain so high that any attempted expedition seems doomed to end in failure. It’s like staring at that forest of six-foot weeds on the allotment you’ve been allocated after years on the waiting list. You know that if you start digging it over at one end, by the time you reach the far boundary, your initial efforts will have vanished beneath another carpet of weeds.… READ MORE.... …
Two diverting walks to report. I’m afraid I got so bored with this entry that I’ll leave the second to next time. Here’s the first. 1. Sunday 14 March, Wagitalersee: Ah! Nothing better than a bracing walk in a blizzard to blow a few cobwebs from the fat bloke emerging from winter hibernation — even if a statement as glibly positive as this will be heard only after the trauma is over, and the memory rapidly diminishing in the rear-view mirror. My German friend, C, messaged me far too early for a Sunday — a common character defect among the wholesome Teutonic peoples.… READ MORE.... …
What’s another word for thesaurus? I was carefully considering this important matter the other day when it struck me that one problem with this pre-retirement period is that I’m running out of things to worry about. It’s starting to concern me, and the fact that my increasing lack of anxiety is becoming quite stressful is itself a cause for mounting unease. Part of the problem is that I’m trying not to waste too much time on traditional sources of angst — news and current affairs. The unique permutation of prejudices and preferences we must each shoulder ensures that no consensus can exist on what the news actually is or should be, rendering most of it pretty pointless and unnecessarily provocative.… READ MORE.... …
Travel doesn’t just broaden the mind, it puts a bomb under everything you’ve ever known and detonates it in slow motion. The above headline should have been more startling than it was when I spotted it recently on www.swissinfo.ch. It’s all about the the burning of the Böögg, naturally: the climax to the annual spring parade in Zürich. The poor chap is stuffed with fireworks and set on fire in a ritual that’s watched with keen interest because the shorter the time taken for his head to explode, the longer and hotter the summer will be. The question is what can we do with that summer?… READ MORE.... …
As someone whose earlier athletic history would have made an arthritic sloth look like Usain Bolt, my midlife running career was an autobiographical plot twist to make even Jed Mercurio blush. So the idea of trying to revive this dead horse, seven years after it gratefully sank into the darkness beneath the coffin lid of the 2013 Berlin Marathon, is hard to explain. Yet here I am near the end of week 2 of the C25K programme, a veteran of seven mild jaunts. Alive. As week 1 finished, some weird part of me was even looking forward to week 2, but my shameful confession is that increasing the initial 60-second run by 50 percent this week has been challenging, despite the compensation of having to execute only six of the blighters instead of eight last week.… READ MORE.... …
This week’s Mars landing revived memories of that most famous faux pas of them all, and acted as a suitable backdrop for another tectonic event — the official start of my campaign to complete a 5K run without intervention from the Grim Reaper. As any social media captive or desolate blogger will know, we’re all located at the centre of our own universes, and so, folded within this afternoon’s modest exertions, I spared a few sympathetic seconds to Neil Armstrong. I suppose one consolation is that if you’re going to mess up your lines so spectacularly, best that you do it as far away as possible.… READ MORE.... …