“Hi! Good to see you again! It’s been a while!”, said the gym staff member. “What have you been doing?” “Eating, mainly” It’s tough to encapsulate a year’s worth of non-gym attendance into a single constructive sentence, but as I fast-rewound 2016 that was the best I could come up with. She looked at me…
Tag: distance running
Dutch Pea Soup
My Mum does a great Dutch pea soup. It’s thick to the point of chewy and is filled with innumerable ingredients, most of which you could never prove were in there because they’ve been cooked into a merger. It has a sneaky heat about it…Which brings me more neatly than you’d think to the 2015 Cayman Islands Half-Marathon.
NYC Marathon Part 8: After the Aftermath – 26.2 Points
For about an hour after the marathon I was wondering whether perhaps running marathons was – for me – a bad idea. I recalled the skinny guy in the med tent telling a medic that this was his first and he wasn’t sure he was cut out for this. Well if he’s not cut out…
NYC Marathon Part 1: Belvedere Hotel-Brooklyn (0-2 miles)
“In the meantime 49,000 of my newest and worst dressed friends were doing the same thing in an unsurpassed festival of sartorial dissonance.”
The Doldrums
This was galling: 15 months previously anything over a few hundred yards was a major achievement, and here I was giving a half-marathon the big shrug. Someone’s really got to lead the charge in changing the name to something energising. Something that sounds like a completion rather than the…y’know…half completion of something.
Marathon Debut, last part…honest…
“I wondered to myself whether any uninjured person on target for their goal time has even stopped at the 20 mile mark. Maybe if lots of people have…there’s probably a Facebook group for those people where everyone congratulations each other on reaching the big 2-0 in miles and fighting back against the lunatic idolising of 26.2.”
Marathon Debut, Part 3
One supposedly helpful phrase from a trainer haunted me through much of my marathon training: “After 10 miles you should feel as if you have put in very little effort”, which is to say, ‘if you’re hoping to do 26.2 miles without it killing you, you should still be feeling pretty good after 10, otherwise…yeesh…you don’t wanna know’.
Cayman Half-Marathon, December 2014
I made sure to suck in my stomach, don my mask of supreme confidence and speed up a tad as I passed them…and I just about resisted shouting “I’M KICKING YOUR DAD’S BUTT!” at one of them.
Rumspringa Half-Marathon, April 2014
“Unfortunately the start of today’s race is delayed because I miscalculated the speed of Amish horse and carts.”
A sentence like that could only have been unwelcome if I was standing still, wearing only the thinnest clothes, in freezing conditions with a wind chill of minus 10 degrees centigrade. Which it was…
The Cayman Islands Half-Marathon 2013
Rational people do not get up at 3.30am to go running. Not unless there is a bear that has chosen that round-numbered moment of the night to come crashing through your bedroom wall. And even then, you’d want to weigh up whether being ripped to shreds by a grizzly was really that much worse than all…
PORK ROPE 