Up and down

Nottingham.

I wouldn’t normally stay in a Premier Inn for work, but opted to do so this time, as there’s a Virgin Active gym next door, which opens its doors to hotel residents.

But once I’d checked in, and discovered that I could watch the Arsenal-Porto Champions League game only in the bar, my plans began crumbling. Instead of two hours of noble sweat and saintliness, it was two hours of beer and pizza and televised football. Just two pints, but any alcohol at all these days seems to leave an ugly footprint on the following morning, especially when I leave the heating on all night.

I’m writing this early, before heading off for a morning of meetings, and my head feels like it has a duvet stuffed into the cranial cavity where a brain once resided.

Without using the gym, I can’t find much to recommend this place. The vista perhaps. It’s always good to see an illuminated football ground. Meadow Lane is close by, just the other side of the Trent. Last night it cast a melancholy yellow glow through the fog, drawing people in, the way a tolling bell drags mourners to a funeral.

Indeed, there’s a veritable forest of floodlight pylons over there. Some presumably belong to the other football club, whose name escapes me, and some to Trent Bridge, the cricket ground. From up here on the 6th floor, I’m treated to a grand sweep over South Nottingham. Plenty of sooty brick left to admire; the husk of the city’s industrial past. Wasn’t Alan Sillitoe a Nottingham lad? One has to presume that he had bleak industrial landscapes like this in his heart when he wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, even if the act of writing it happened in more exotic surroundings.

Shame about the gym, but it’s symptomatic of the week, which isn’t working out as intended. Last week, by contrast, was a great success. Exertion from start to finish. The record looks good: 7 active days out of 8, and an average of more than an hour of cardiovascular each day. But even that story didn’t have a perfect ending.

On Sunday, I ventured onto the treadmill for my first lengthy session for some weeks. Warmed up for ten minutes, then decided to crank up the heartrate a bit by pushing the speed up to beyond 10K an hour. I was happily bouncing along at this pace for a few minutes when I felt the calf going again, and had to stop. After stretching, I got back on, and managed a whole hour, but at a slower speed. The leg continued to ache, but I put up with it.

It made me wonder, again, if I can simply learn to tolerate the discomfort. Most of the time I can, but the whole thing is complicated by it jumping from mere ache to occcasional sharp pain that is impossible to run on at all. I’ve been pretty good about the core and glutes strengthening campaign, but I don’t expect to see results for a while. Maybe I should consider orthotics.