Monday 19/07/10

I’m not up to much at the moment so it feels right to piss myself off with some good, old-fashioned masochism. Normally I make myself suffer psychologically. Stuff like screwing up my A Levels, trying to play Fifa 10 online or watching Lee Nelson’s Well Good Show. Now, though, I’ve voluntarily put my body in physical pain without the promise of any gain. I’ve agreed to do a half marathon in September. A half marathon, despite the ‘half’ prefix (as if to soften the blow of the ‘marathon’ bit) is still 13.1 miles.

For me to do a half marathon, I need to train. I went online to find a decent schedule given the limited time I have and the currently terrible physical state I’m in. The training consists of basically running 6 days a week, every week, until the day of the race. I will average 50 miles a week, meaning over the 10 weeks I will have run the equivalent of over 38 half marathons in the training for one. Its like feeding somebody 100 wedding cakes a day for 100 weeks in preparation for an eating contest that involves eating a Mr Kipling jam tart. By the time the race comes around, I’ll be so used to running long distances that I shall barely feel it. I should imagine.

You can judge somebody’s athletic ability in one simple way; by asking them the minimum distance they would run for a charitable cause. If they replied with 5k, you can assume they are not great at running. If they say they wouldn’t want sponsorship for anything less than 20 kilometres, you have a good runner who feels he has to earn the right to be paid to run. If they won’t take sponsorship and would be happy to run a whole marathon without being paid on behalf of Scope then you’re into keen-o Paula Radcliffe territory. Conversely, anybody who wants sponsoring for the Sport Relief mile will probably die of obesity-onset diabetes by the age of 50.

Of course, I’m only one day in so any motivation I have at this stage is likely to disappear the moment the hard work comes. So far, I have only done a solitary 5 mile run and am already in pain. I got out of bed and managed to pull my calf muscle and earlier got cramp while sitting on the couch so perhaps balancing the running with some stretching and decent nutrition might help. It’s a learning process.