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 in search of good health and less voluminous trousers. It’s worthy, and no doubt will help others achieve good things. I’m all in favour, though I didn’t learn anything. The author’s experiences are ones I’d already been through back in the early part of this century, and described in some detail earlier in this blog.
The brief running spells are growing less uncomfortable, and it’s another azure cell in my spreadsheet. In Switzerland, one of my German friends, a keen runner, used to laugh at me for assiduously keeping a record of occasional activity. This was deemed dangerously obsessive behaviour. She’d nip out for a half hour or so at lunchtime to hare round the hilltop village we laboured in. No watch, no times listed in a spreadsheet. She just wanted some exercise. What was the big deal? She felt the same about races. Waste of time and money, in her view.
My brain works in a different way. I need to be able to gaze at rows of figures to feel reassured that I’m chipping away at some target, even if that goal is rarely reached. I need to know I’m doing more now than I did, and that I’m on some upward trajectory to paradise. For me, an unlogged run or walk is a void, a terrible waste of effort. If you run through a wood unseen and unrecorded, did it ever really happen?
The end of the month is a time to review progress. Well done February. You done great, as Martinus Evans would say. January too, though starting to run again, albeit haltingly, this month gives February extra significance. The headline figures: The first 8 days of the C25K plan completed, with a total of 69 running minutes. At this stage of the game, every single minute seems worth covering in gold leaf and displaying in a glass case. I’m hoping that ere March is out, this attitude will have changed, and that I’ll be capable of plodding at least 20 minutes without my legs crumbling beneath me.
Walking target for February was 840 brisk minutes, as defined by my NHS Active 10 app. The criteria used are a mystery. I walked 1,516 external minutes in total but only 971 were deemed strenuous enough for inclusion, though this was still 15.6% over target. This figure includes minutes recorded as part of the C25K plan.
Today, the last day of the month, I strode around the local cemetery and around a few streets, beaming with pleasure. The source of my joy wasn’t just my spreadsheet. It was the sunshine. For the first time in months, the sun was warm and bright today. Early signs of spring are everywhere. After watching green shoots popping up everywhere over the past two or three weeks, suddenly, we have daffodils. Lovely.
