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 before R5, W3, R8, W5, R5, for a total of 18 minutes of running. It’s feeling increasingly comfortable. The inchingly incremental nature of this sort of plan eases the ascent up the ladder of endurance. Like boiling a frog in reverse, as it were. Instead of slowly killing something, I’m slowly breathing life into the corpse. If I’m killing anything I guess it’s lassitude. Torpor.
Talking of the plan, there’s news on that front. I’ve surreptitiously graduated to a more adventurous programme. Similar, but it’s a 14-week C210K instead of the original 9-week NHS C25K programme. A good thing too. The C25K was obliging me to jump up to a 20-minute run next time out. I presumed that the C210K plan was the same but I’ve just discovered that their incline is a little kinder. Instead of leaping from 8 minutes to 20 in one eyebrow-raising step, their programme stops off at runs of 10, 12, 15 and 18-minutes en route to 20. All that said, I can see a point quite soon when I abandon the strictures of the plan and start improvising a little more. I get the idea, and may prefer to adapt it. The runs are getting easier, if that’s the right word. More doable. Less daunting. I’d no doubts about the 8-minute requirements, and have none about moving up to 10.
It’s still annoyingly chilly out there. The recent warm sunny weather seduced me into celebrating a change of seasons that hasn’t quite happened after all. The way I was behaving, I could have been setting off from the Tabard in Southwark in 1380, one of Chaucer’s merry pilgrims, so buoyed was I by the sense that spring was exploding round my ears. Instead, it seems we still have the gusty dregs of winter to clear up and sweep away.
Later in the afternoon I boarded a train to London, met my old schoolfriend Kev in Sloane Square for a bite to eat, then headed off to Stamford Bridge for the Chelsea vs Copenhagen European Conference League game. I’d not been to this venue since August 1990, when I watched Chelsea beat Derby County 2-1. It was the first Saturday of that season, and I recall the Chelsea players and crowd sportingly applauding onto the pitch, Peter Shilton and Mark Wright, heroes of England’s recent near-success in the Italia 90 World Cup.
The stadium and environs have since been developed by the Abramovitch billions into an unsettlingly claustrophobic, overpopulated warren of underlit passages, signless staircases, and guarded doors into hospitality nooks. I didn’t like that part of the experience though things improved once inside. Although the stadium’s been extensively rebuilt, our stand, just behind the dugouts, still seemed rickety and old-fashioned. Shades of Everton’s Goodison Park, now in its final season. I’ve been to Goodison twice in the last 12 months and charmingly redolent though it is of a bygone age, it was probably the right time to bin it off.
A Copenhagen victory would have sent me home happier but I had to settle for Chelsea grinding out a 1-0 win, and progress into the quarter-finals. A good experience overall though. There’s something pleasingly visceral about sitting just behind the coaches, and watching the tensions and fretfulness play out. At least the match finished without extra time so I was able to get back to the coast before half-past midnight. As much as I like London (being a Londoner by birth and upbringing), it’s always a relief to escape it. Despite its manifest attractions, I try to avoid travelling to London, especially in the evening. Too big and too jammed with people and anxieties — theirs and mine. Give me the easy, unconfined blustery seaside any day.
