March Or Die

[Sweder]

...and LadyRunner too, who has been an appreciated and increasingly frequent visitor recently. You can have your own training diary too, LR, should you wish.

Main thing though is to keep running, everyone.

Good shout MLCMan; LR is having more adventures than most these days - races, long walk/ runs, a 20k walk race in Spain last month, a marathon in Rotterdam very soon ... I like her style on the road and on these pages. It would be great to read her take on our collective adventures.

Perhaps for LR as for many of us time is the auld enemy. Amongst El Cuckoo's incoherent ramblings above (blushes) he makes a salient point about that social media wunderkind, Twitter. I'm addicted to it. I tweet, therefore I am, and there's the rub. Regular (sometimes hourly, sometimes more frequently) posts of the 140-characters-or-less variety can slake a man's creative thirst. Most of it of course is utter nonsense; banal trivia exchanged with kindred spirits; live commentary on cookery shows or terrace-like barracking during sporting events. There are useful links, occasional insights but for the most part it's bollocks.

The truth is Twitter is insidious, invasive and downright distracting. For those of us with Tweetdeck - the Cape Canaveral of social media desktop applications - the intrusions are manifold. Exchanging witty (or otherwise) banter with 'Tweeple' is, frankly, considerably more fun than, ooh, I don't know, working? As some here may have surmised I have a somewhat addictive nature. I've been likened - by friends - to Toad of Toad Hall, jumping on the Next Big Thing, hurling bundles of wild enthusiasm at the latest fad. Well, like El Cuckoo I've reached that point where Badger and Moley have found me bouncing along the road on my arse clutching a steering wheel and burbling 'poop poop'.

Time to take stock. Time to get a grip.
In a classic case of mid-life crisis I've started an affair with a younger, more attractive mistress. She makes me feel vital and vibrant, energised and engaged. She looks good; she's modern, popular and turns heads wherever she goes. She dotes on me, sends me messages at all hours of the day and night, feeds my ego, strokes my ... well, let's bail out of this metaphor before we all regret reading this shall we? I too shall uninstall the dreaded Tweetdeck from my laptop. I shall eschew the humerous musings of my Ethernet pals (some of whom are genuinely funny and who have become, in a thoroughly modern way, friends) and return to Planet Earth. Sweder In Real Life.

Breaking up with Twitter will not solve my running woes, but it will remove a seductive, insistant distraction. I believe that, for me, running is the answer, or at least an answer. To run free in the hills around my home is to speak with God, or nature, or whatever ethereal deity floats your boat. It frees my mind, let's the creative (yes, and the nonsensical) juices flow. Without running in my life I am simply a fat(ter), rather dull sofa-dweller. It's time to Ditch the Bitch and return to loving arms of my One True Love.