WEEKEND!!
I mean, hello! Hope you've found this Saturday as relaxing as I have. And by relaxing I mean:
- A morning spent at a women-only CrossFit session with Outcast Swansea. No smelly boys to slow us down! Except for the coach. Who wasn't smelly, and who refused to tolerate any slowing down. At all. And he tried to kill us with burpees. Like, kill us dead. It was touch and go for a moment there, as I wondered whether I'd ever get my breath back, but I loved it, and survived to tell the tale!
- An afternoon unwisely spent in town Christmas shopping, which is a fancy term for spending 45mins parking and 10mins dodging elbows in the shops, getting too stressed and shuffling back to the car with tail between legs and a single pair of jeans. Tis the season to be elbowed in the boobs by browsing strangers.
"Okay, time to get ou-AAAARGH IS THAT A HERNIA?!!"
Needless to say, I don't suffer DOMS (stands for "death of muscles. Shit.") graciously.
On Monday, I went for a short jog that turned into a magical, hilly 10 miler, because I'd discovered that we've got one of those electric signs that detects cars' speeds on a hill near our house, and I childishly wanted to try and beat my time. On one loop, 26mph flashed up, but it turned out that there was just a car behind me. Shame. Anyway, I figured out that if I run downhill with all my might and just a bit of arm flapping, I can reach a princely speed of... 7 miles per hour.
My cheetah-esque abilities aside, I really enjoyed that run. Distance in double digits (the name of my first album/book/autobiography...whichever comes first) is usually a daunting prospect for me. I've done it, but not all that many times, and I almost always have to grit my teeth through it, at the very least towards the end. There's something special about those runs, of any distance, that end up being much more enjoyable than you initially though it would be. The more often I do this putting one foot in front of the other thing, the more handy little tools and mental games I'm picking up to help me pass the time and to get more out of a run.
That being said, I have a WAY bigger list of things I've learned the hard way not to do when I'm out on my shuffles, so I'm going to dispense those findings to you instead. So, here is my list of the multiple ways you can make a regular run completely suck balls. Don't say I never give you anything.
1. Look at your watch/tracking doohicky regularly to see how far you've gone/how much time has passed. I guarantee it will be less than you wanted, and you will want to cry.
2. Expect the run to be easy, because you've been doing it lots now, and this is only going to be a slow one. I don't think I've ever found a run easy, or that I ever will. My opinion is that it never any less difficult (though there is a small chance I've just been doing it wrong the entire time...Let's not rule that one out). You just learn to embrace being challenged. Unless you're hungry, or it's windy out. Then it's totally okay to just sit in the house and eat chocolate spread on toast. Especially because you've just discovered that Maltesers does a crunchy spread now, called Teasers and it's the best thing in the effing WORLD! Beautiful, glorious, evil sugar-paste. Mmmmm.
3. Eat something heavy immediately before you head out the door. For energy and that. And by "that", I mean vomit.
4. Worry from start to finish about how slow you are and how that elderly gentleman that whizzed past you on his mobility scooter was definitely smirking at you like he was in a convertible sports car and you were in a Morris Minor. Whatever, guy. Morris Minors are cool.
5. Make sure you have enough noisy change and keys in your pockets in order to be driven slowly insane.
6. Forget to take music with you.
7. Try to distract yourself from the fact that you're running and that your legs/lungs/bum cheeks/entire body hurts. It won't make everything seem ten times worse, honest. Go ahead. Try so hard to "engross yourself in nature" that dog walkers wonder why you're so angry at their pets.
8. Make your strides unnaturally long so that it's all over with faster, or so short that you're emulating that classic, British "trotting across the car park" run that people do when they see cars coming but are too civilized to break into a full on jog.
9. Constantly calculate how much further it is you have to go. Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
...Are we there yet?
10. Pick a completely flat, out-and-back route with no decent views. That way, both your brain and body get a big, fat slice of boredom. Yippee, hooray!
And there we have it! Plenty more where that came from. I am most definitely shirking my calling as a personal trainer, aren't I? Such motivation. Much positive. Wow.
Happy running, peoples! =)
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