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.