4 miles and some new shoes

4.27 miles, to be precise. I forgot my running shoes this weekend (along with almost everything else that I needed for the weekend - basically have my cycling kit, a laptop and the clothes I'm standing up in), and it was time anyways, so it was down to Runners Need for a new pair. Times have changed a bit since the chaps passed you several pairs of shoes, then watched your gait as you ran up and down the road outside the shop: now it's all treadmills and video cameras on your feet. Which is quite scary really : I had no idea that I turned my ankles in quite so much - almost 90 degrees much in the case of my right foot, not quite so bad on my left. But lovely to be able to see how quickly that could be corrected, just by choosing the right running shoe. Which is a men's Brooks Adrenaline GTS 9 in a size 7.5.

Now you might have thought that running was a cheap sport. You get into your trainers, go out on the street - no membership fees, no price-per-run. It's not. As soon as you start running distance - and by distance I mean anything over about 15 miles a week - you're into serious shoe money, of the sort that only my girlfriends shopping in Covent Garden can equal. The Adrenalines were £85, and to keep my feet safe, I now need to replace them every 3 or 4 months. Which is roughly equal to a deal on a gym subscription: £28 per month (my works gym is £15, but that's subsidised). Then there's race fees (because you can't run for long before wondering what it's like to run in company agaist the clock), which are admittedly partly offset by the free t-shirts that most of them give out, although a love of bright colours seems to be important for this right now. And then there's the Runners World magazine habit, and all the detritus that seems to come with running distance - the funny-shaped water bottles, runners pouches, lightweight jackets etc. None of which I bregrudge - I'm just sticking to the trainer tax (and there are ways to make those cheaper: Adrenaline 9s are £76.50 at wiggle, Adrenaline 8s were £40 at prodirectrugby.com and so on - basically, go back one version at the right time and you can get your shoes for roughly half price) and race fees for now.

So, having bought my trainers, I needed somewhere to christen them, and it's only a week to the Bluewater 10k, so I really do need to go out and pound those pavements. D duly threw me out for a run that we'd mapped, discussed, planned on a 3-mile route that even I couldn't get lost on. I got lost. It involved a park with activity stations - I found a park with activity stations, but this being London and London being full of parks, it was the wrong one. Never mind - I ran round, made a guess at the right way home, checked a local bus-stop map and miraculously (for me) set off in the right direction. Running verdict? Right knee blew out again (swelled up during the run and had to be manipulated back into the right place relative to my leg) but no other problems with the shoes - feet v. comfortable in them. Run quite a fun one through some well-mixed urban terrain - projects to city farm and victorian ornamental park. Could have run on for a mile or two, but not sure about anything longer than that - will have to work hard before I can start to attempt the underround seriously.

Oh stupidity (but fun) - the Underround

A runner of my acquaintance (okay, it's Kevin from the office) has challenged me to the Underround. It's a marathon. For fell runners. Who live in London. Actually, it's inspired: use the stairs and escalators on the underground as a fell running circuit. 24 miles, 42 stations: run between stations, then run down the stairs/escalators to the yellow line on the platform then back up to the surface again. It's probably not to be attempted during rush hour, but on a quiet Sunday...

Anyways, I have two 10ks and a 10 mile to complete before then. But I might start practicing on small or not-so-small sections of the route, just so I don't get lost (and run even further than I need to) on the day. Heck, I could start an offshoot and plot out the Underround 10k, 10 mile and half marathon...

Fat burn at last!

A small training note today, so I remember this. Another 3 mile run this morning. It's a boring run, but the roundabouts mean that I know the exact mileage when something significant happens. And this morning, the fat-burning started. I haven't felt the dip then rise of the switch from food-burn to fat-burn for -erm- possibly a year or two now (it usually happens dead on 2 miles at a 10-minute-mile pace), but this morning it happened. The first half mile was horrible: leaden, slow, headachy (beer and chinese last night - hangover guaranteed), the next couple okay, but then I slowed down at mile two. Leaden, heavy, difficult to push through until, at 2 and a quarter miles, I suddenly picked up and started running smoothly again. Which felt good - as though I was flowing across the pavement, rather than thudding my feet on the long grind across it. I even put in a small sprint finish, just to feel the joy of getting my limbs to move as fast as they could - which admittedly isn't terribly fast, but it's fast enough to feel good.

First run

First run for ages this morning. A 3-mile there-and-back run: 2 mile there and back, then 1 mile there and back, all distances marked with convenient roundabouts. It's boring, but it works: it gives me a set of timed distances that I can lengthen or shorten as I wish. And therein lies a potential problem. The cheat options on a round route are more limited: walk, take a short cut, turn back on yourself. But on a there-and-back, there's a continual negotiation about just how far the run needs to be today... I had the talk with myself at 1/2 mile ("could just do a mile") and 1.5 miles ("could just do two").

But I did do the whole run, because there's a lot of truth in the saying "the road to hell...". Haven't you ever wodnered why there are so many fat swimmers and dog walkers out there? You know that they do regular exercise, but somehow they just don't get any thinner. Well, that's been happening to me recently. And the trouble is that doing exercise is not the same as doing enough exercise. I can run a mile in the morning and tell myself that I've been running, but I haven't really. No, really. I've do 10 minutes of kidding myself that 10 minutes is enough to make me thin and sexy again. What I need to do is run regularly, and run long enough to kick into fat-burning, which in my case is about 40 minutes of strong exercise, i.e. about 60 minutes of the gentle trot that I did this morning. That's why I always seem to lose weight from races: it's not the race adrenalin, but the distances (10k, 10 miles) that does it. This also applies to cycling (less than 20 miles is a nice little ride, or training for doing more than 20 miles), swimming (what do you mean, 'rest at the end for a while'?) and going to the gym (if you're not moving, you're not training, no matter how pretty you look posed there in a leotard). All of which is horribly dispiriting when you actually start to train, because for a long time the short runs are all you're capable of doing. But like all these things, it's a long game. And thin fitness comes to she who waits. As long as she's moving plenty whilst she's doing that waiting.