Running weekly

As someone whose earlier athletic history would have made an arthritic sloth look like Usain Bolt, my midlife running career was an autobiographical plot twist to make even Jed Mercurio blush. So the idea of trying to revive this dead horse, seven years after it gratefully sank into the darkness beneath the coffin lid of the 2013 Berlin Marathon, is hard to explain. Yet here I am near the end of week 2 of the C25K programme, a veteran of seven mild jaunts. Alive. As week 1 finished, some weird part of me was even looking forward to week 2, but my shameful confession is that increasing the initial 60-second run by 50 percent this week has been challenging, despite the compensation of having to execute only six of the blighters instead of eight last week. More on that next time. I won’t be too embarrassed to repeat a week I find difficult. Even in my relatively sprightly fifties, my dubious ability never merited the right to crow about times or personal landmarks, so I won’t be starting that sort of nonsense now.

Last Sunday, for the last of the week 1 obligations, I treated myself to a change of scene and headed over to Zug, about 20 minutes’ drive from where Iive. To describe Zug as an affluent, self-satisfied lakeside town with a nice view of the mountains doesn’t offer much of an introduction as you could copy and paste the same description onto countless places in this country. But it’s a fair summary. I like the town, In happier times I’m there once or twice a month to visit the cinema or to meet up with a mate to watch football in the ‘British pub’. Even in lockdown, Zug is a nice place to visit, as long as you don’t need to enter any sort of building or confined space. And on a sunny Sunday afternoon the lakeside path offers a laidback carnival atmosphere where buskers and street performers mingle with the tantalising aromas of marijuana and seared Bratwurst. It was through these complementary clouds that I plodded my final 8 bursts of jogging, alternating with the designated brisk walking. Neither of these activities are well-defined, and looking at the stats on my phone app afterwards, I get the feeling that my creaking body is treating them as more similar than they’re intended to be.