So, 17 days into the new regime, and it’s 9 gym sessions and 3 runs under the slightly loosening belt. Good progress: I’m pleased and excited again.
The third 3 mile run was yesterday lunchtime, a relaxed but unbroken trot along the towpath. Maybe I’ve been too hard on the canal in recent times. The only dull aspect is that runs here are normally out-and-back. Having to retrace your steps, or do more than one lap of the same circuit, is strangely dispiriting for a runner. Why? I guess it reinforces the idea that you’re not really going anywhere, whereas with one big loop or point-to-point, you can kid yourself that you have a destination. You have a greater sense of purpose.
Yesterday I decided to try appreciating my surroundings with more generosity of spirit than usual: it seemed to work. Two things worked in its favour: one is the blanket of economic doom under which we’re now slowly suffocating. The news has been bad for months now, but has recently turned distinctly apocalyptic. Being a news and current affairs addict, I subject myself to greater doses of this global melancholy than most, so it was especially heartening to escape for 40 minutes or so, and offer myself up to the silence and solitude of the gently meandering canal. It replenishes something sucked out by macro-political news. Yesterday, I truly experienced the benefit of this. It felt good.
The second helping hand came from a set of broken headphones. Last Sunday in the gym, one earpiece died, and despite bashing it several times with a hefty clawhammer and putting it through the dishwasher, it never revived. It’s an alarming admission, but I was tempted to feel a faint sense of panic when confronted with the possibility of going for a musicless run. I’m vehemently against iPods in races, but I’ve come to regard a throbbing soundtrack as a fundamental part of my training routine.
I came to my senses, quite literally, as I set off down the canal without being strapped into an iPod. I was glad of the change, and the new perspective. Would I have heard the heron splashing over the surface of the canal behind me otherwise? I doubt it. The silence, instead of being the feared threat, was a big chunk of the journey’s pleasure.
The run itself, though only 3 and a bit miles, wasn’t easy. There’s no shame in admitting it. I’m pleased with the recent activity, but I’m still desperately unfit. I feel myself lumbering rather than running, and would have struggled to have added another mile. The positive news is that there was no walk break. It was slow but steady, and I’m happy with that. The flab is continuing to melt, albeit slowly, and the pace and fitness should improve in line with it.
The most recent of the 9 gym sessions came at 7 a.m. today, in the very well-equipped ‘health centre’ here at the Radisson, Stansted. It’s an interesting hotel, with a pretty remarkable, if kitsch, central feature of a ‘wine tower’: an illuminated square perspex tube around 60 feet high, filled with wine in racks. When someone orders a bottle, an acrobatic girl in a leotard attached to some sort of rope, is launched up this tower to retrieve the wine. Weird, and annoyingly compelling.
Wine is a lovely liquid, but my current preoccupation is with another. After 37 minutes in the gym, huffing on the usual string of cardiovascular machines — treadmill, elliptical trainer, static bike, rowing machine, stepper — I was able to produce a decent quantity of that glorious, salty wet stuff.
More tomorrow.
