Here we go again!Training starts in the kitchen.
It's been a year and ten days or so since I last posted on this blog, or thought in any serious way about running come to that. Which is why I find myself once again with aching limbs and a slight sense of hopelessness at the task ahead of me after trying to get back into training.
I have set myself the task of walking, cycling and running my way back to fitness over the next 12 months, while at the same time trying to hit a new fundraising target of £3000 for the British Heart Foundation, to whom it would not be melodramatic of me to say that in part I owe my life, as well as the brilliant surgeons and medical staff in the NHS.
On June 12 I am taking on a ten mile leg of a 50 mile walk around Bristol with the business breakfast club I go to, as they have kindly adopted BHF as their official charity for the year.
During the August Bank Holiday I will be cycling the approximately 100 miles from Bristol to London for the Action Medical Research charity, and on September 11 I will be taking part in the Bristol Half Marathon, again for the BHF. I hope to follow all of this in Spring with a marathon, if I can get a place, in either London or Edinburgh. And who knows what along the way, perhaps a triathlon if I can improve my swimming beyond the sedate breast stroke I am barely capable of at the moment.
So I pulled on my Asics for the first time in anger for a while, and weirdly the thirty minute walk/slow jog I did today was probably harder than running the London Marathon a year ago, mainly because I’ve done next to no training since then and have managed to find the four stone I lost along the way on my last get fit mission.
But today was good because I was able to set my new goals and I didn’t hate the act of running as much as I thought I might. All positive stuff. Except the route I chose is not really much good as it takes me down a path along the roadside that I instantly nicknamed Dog Turd Alley, but could just as equally be know as Fag Butt Valley, Tin Can Cut Through or Fly Tipping Boulevard.
I have been motivated today more than before because I weighed in at 18 stone and a pound this morning, which is quite depressing and would explain why I can’t fit into any of my clothes these days, or walk up a street without stopping to catch breath.
So, been here and done it all before, and I know what I need to do, but it seems so much harder to do it again. Winning the Premiership is an amazing achievement in itself, but doing it again, time after time, that’s what makes real champions. Ask any Man Utd fan. Unfortunately I’m a Southampton fan.
