The Fat Bloke Diaries
Episode Thirty – Keep On Keeping On
Running a mile is a bit like watching a Sylvester
Stallone movie. If you can switch your brain off and just go with it, then the time
flies by and it can be quite fun. There’s a perverse kind of pleasure to be had from
knowing that 200,000 years of human evolution has led to this.
Yet in both cases
there are terrible downsides – one leads to pain in the legs and a burning in the
lungs as you gasp for oxygen, the other has the Italian Stallion’s terrible acting
and slurred delivery – but some believe that both can be worth it if you’re prepared
to take the punishment.
Now I’ve seen many Stallone movies before (even the appalling
‘Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot’), but I’d never run a mile in my life. My standard comment
on the subject has always been, “miles? They’re the reason that God invented wheels”.
But with my 10km run just four short months away I’ve had to become a bit of a slave
to my training plan. Not in an exercise addict kind of way, but more like a ‘if I
don’t keep up to speed I’ll let everyone down on the day’ burden of potential guilt.
It had to come eventually and one day last week the plan said, ‘Today’s challenge:
Run a mile’. I’d seen it coming several days before so I logged onto the net and
mapped my route. I had it all planned: warm-
That was my plan
and that’s more or less what I did. Once you get past your teenage years, the number
of things that you do for the first time lessen dramatically. Cross the forty year
threshold and they dwindle away to virtually nil, but this was a genuine first for
me. I’d never really had a need to run that far before, but I’d read enough to know
that there’s no trick to it, no arcane technique passed down from father to son.
You just put one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the
other, in front of the other… carry on like this and I could fill today’s 800 words
really easily while also effectively illustrating the boredom involved in running
any distance. I know that it was only a mile but I feel that I’ve opened a small
window into the mental tedium of a marathon runner’s world.
And you know what? Nothing
went wrong. There were no juvenile muggers, no comedy moments of doggie-
I enjoyed it that much that a few days later I ran two kilometres. That’s
only a third of a mile longer but sounds so much more. I heard that there was an
indoor athletic championship recently where they ran two kilometres in around five
minutes thirty. My time was 15:34, but then again I don’t think that they had to
negotiate the dog leavings, hypodermics, condoms and the rusty wheelbarrow hurdle
on the back straight, all of which can be found at my local track.
I’m absolutely
on track with my training. I’ve now swum a little, run a little, cycled a little.
Doing them all individually on different days is plenty enough for me, but in a spooky
twist of colliding fates, the company that I work for has just made an announcement.
They’re holding a mini-
For half a micro-
Why on Earth would I?
©
2009 Shaun Finnie