Running without being chased

In May 2010 I signed up for the Brighton Marathon. 

I was overweight and was rubbish at dieting.  Frankly it’s a bit of a stereotypical story of setting ridiculous goals and doing stupid things only to get nowhere.  I was unhappy because I simply felt like I took up too much room.  It was also during a time when things weren’t going so well and when life is like that you really do want to feel as small as possible to try and hide away from it all.  So I guess I couldn’t hide so I had to run...

Running wasn’t exactly an obvious choice.  I’d tried running as an exercise option previously and found it to be a curiously vicious form of torture.  Not to mention I have Joint Hypermobility and occasionally suffer with “dodgy hips” as a result.  So why do it?  It was a control thing I think.  I couldn’t make anything else go right in my life at that time so I thought I’d try to trick myself into getting thinner and healthier by setting up a goal where weight loss would be a kind of by-product.  The marathon was there as an option so I signed up.

If you’d like a bit of context about the last time I did any kind of running event, might I draw your attention to my Virgin Money Giving page for a fuller explanation and the chance to sponsor me for the midnight half marathon I’m doing for the British heart Foundation in late October, no pressure though as I know pennies are valuable and I’m grateful enough to you for reading this!

I didn’t exactly get off to a flying start but I’d opted for interval training to help get my fitness levels up.  I did some reading and this seemed to be the fastest yet most sensible way to go about it.  I’d found some training programmes in Zest magazine so got cracking.  I was genuinely doing really well, progressing through the weeks of the program at a good pace.  Then something weird happened to my Achilles tendon and it was game over.  Being hyper mobile sometimes seems to mean that any kind of muscular or tendon type injury takes a lot longer to come good and then strengthening it again takes longer still.  I was out of my trainers for 3 months and by that point it was February so I knew that the 2011 marathon was out of the question so woefully I deferred my place.

I didn’t bloody give up though!  I’ve said I was going to do things in the past and then fallen so short of doing them.  I was determined that it wasn’t going to happen again so I deferred my place, went to Brighton Jog Shop and got sorted with better trainers and then slowly but steadily got going again with the training.  Now it took on a new angle as I turn 30 in October 2012 so this has gone on THE LIST.  It's the only thing on it at the moment though.

The day of Brighton Marathon 2011 was quite a miserable one for me.  For that day I felt like such a loser though I shouldn’t have as it didn’t achieve anything.  Then I went running that evening.  And I’m still running.  And running and running and running etc

Marathon day is 15^th April 2012.  At the moment I’m still doing intervals but covering 5.5 miles 3 times a week which aint bad.

So there you have it.  That’s what’s with the running.