Heeeey, heeeey, what's the matter with your faaace, faaaace?!
It's contorted. My face that is. Lips curled into a brazen smile. Twenty-six-year-old wrinkles formed at the corners of my mouth. Cracked, chapped lips. Panting. Red ears. A few beads of what feels like lava sweats down my forehead onto my eyebrows. I'm knackered, elated, relieved, satisfied, ego-recharged, uninhibited. That was me at 9.58am on Sunday, March 21. The Bradford 10k Run completed, my arms were aloft in some kind of ridiculous victory salute as I posed for a quick snap taken by one of the Epilepsy Action bods for my first-person report that would appear in the paper the next day. I felt, and looked like in the photo, as though I'd embraced delirium at the end of some hugely historical and life-changing experience. All I'd done was run a little over six miles continuously. Small victories.
Changes in your mind, changes in your life, changes in the times...
I'd urge any couch potato like me to give a run ago. They're totally addictive. I don 't know how much to apportion it to my own OCD-obsessiveness but you get sucked into overtaking one runner after another based on their physical appearance. Repetitive, unrelenting, vanity...I can't, no won't, finish behind them you say to yourself, eyes on the senior/hefty runner in front of you. In my last three kilometres I took great pleasure in upping my pace to slip passed a less than slight young female, packed into her very, short navy shorts like a whale stuffed into a shoebox or an elephant squeezed into a telephone box or Johnny Vegas in a Smart car - you get the point.
It's all about the dum, dum, dubba, dum, dum
Wonga wise I'm well chuffed. Including Gift Aid, that's a tadge over £200 my kind sponsorers have raised for Ep. Action. Thanks every one who backed me, both donation wise and general encouragement. The plan is to do a 10-mile race happening in Bradford again in October and hopefully, if I can get a place, the London Marathon next year.
Friday, 26 March 2010
Friday, 12 March 2010
"Run Forest, Run!"
'Puppet master, move my strings, my legs don't work'
Never has the idea of a stairlift seemed so attractive. The bath's filling up to ease my weary bones after a three-mile run around a big field. Upon my return home I could barely climb the stairs, I kid you not. Seriously if there is one silliest thing I have done - GCSE English lesson antics excluded - it is surely to sign up to tackle a ten-kilometre (that's 6.2 miles to you and me) run with just a week and a half to get fit.
'How did I get here?'
When the autumn sun fades and the dark, the damp and the doom of winter descends, any exercise I may have been partaking in; albeit on an irregular basis, ceases abruptly. I mean even renting a squash court seems an extravagence as the Christmas-New-Year-penny-pinching kicks in and the notion of jogging in the gloom is all too bleak and too exhausting to even consider. Suddenly you find yourself, dozens of mince pies, numerous swigged beers and countless chocolates later, in a state of comatosed indifference as you wait for spring.
'Tweet, tweet, good morning, this is your spring wake up call'
Well spring, as of two weeks on Sunday - March 28 - does finally arrive. It's official an' that - an hour less in bed. And it is on the Sunday before that I'll be putting a 'day of rest' to the sword, stood scantily clad (given the likely temperature) and looking positively petrified in front of Bradford City Hall. For that's when I'll be staring fearfully down the barrel of the Bradford 10k Race, all in aid of Yeadon-based charity, Epilepsy Action. To anyone whose had even a month's training six miles should be a doddle. A running friend at work boasts she has completed the distance in thirty minutes! On the entry form, when asked for my expected completion time, I hesitated and, suspiciously, filled in the box with one hour and twenty minutes. Afterall I'm a pen pushing, desk jockey whose daily walk up the office stairs leaves me slightly breathless. What other type of people write blogs? Brief forays recently, surfing and horse riding, left my limbs shattered for four days apiece. I'm a sympton of Modern Britain and my own idleness.
'Maggot! Give me 20!'
The training regime. Today's effort was my second run, a three-mile jaunt around The Stray. My circuit is reassuring right next to Harrogate District Hospital. The rain lashed onto my face, my pristine, white leather Reeboks muddied as I traversed dirty puddle after dirty puddle secreted menacingly among the grass as I blazed - eeerhem - my trail. Buoyed by the generosity of my colleagues and friends I attacked it with determination. Refreshed, having had that bath, and sat more comfortably in clean clothes and the stark reality of what I've let myself in for truely dawns. Crap. Nine days to go. Fingers crossed it won't take me that long to get across the finish line.
www.justgiving.com/Ben-Barnett
Never has the idea of a stairlift seemed so attractive. The bath's filling up to ease my weary bones after a three-mile run around a big field. Upon my return home I could barely climb the stairs, I kid you not. Seriously if there is one silliest thing I have done - GCSE English lesson antics excluded - it is surely to sign up to tackle a ten-kilometre (that's 6.2 miles to you and me) run with just a week and a half to get fit.
'How did I get here?'
When the autumn sun fades and the dark, the damp and the doom of winter descends, any exercise I may have been partaking in; albeit on an irregular basis, ceases abruptly. I mean even renting a squash court seems an extravagence as the Christmas-New-Year-penny-pinching kicks in and the notion of jogging in the gloom is all too bleak and too exhausting to even consider. Suddenly you find yourself, dozens of mince pies, numerous swigged beers and countless chocolates later, in a state of comatosed indifference as you wait for spring.
'Tweet, tweet, good morning, this is your spring wake up call'
Well spring, as of two weeks on Sunday - March 28 - does finally arrive. It's official an' that - an hour less in bed. And it is on the Sunday before that I'll be putting a 'day of rest' to the sword, stood scantily clad (given the likely temperature) and looking positively petrified in front of Bradford City Hall. For that's when I'll be staring fearfully down the barrel of the Bradford 10k Race, all in aid of Yeadon-based charity, Epilepsy Action. To anyone whose had even a month's training six miles should be a doddle. A running friend at work boasts she has completed the distance in thirty minutes! On the entry form, when asked for my expected completion time, I hesitated and, suspiciously, filled in the box with one hour and twenty minutes. Afterall I'm a pen pushing, desk jockey whose daily walk up the office stairs leaves me slightly breathless. What other type of people write blogs? Brief forays recently, surfing and horse riding, left my limbs shattered for four days apiece. I'm a sympton of Modern Britain and my own idleness.
'Maggot! Give me 20!'
The training regime. Today's effort was my second run, a three-mile jaunt around The Stray. My circuit is reassuring right next to Harrogate District Hospital. The rain lashed onto my face, my pristine, white leather Reeboks muddied as I traversed dirty puddle after dirty puddle secreted menacingly among the grass as I blazed - eeerhem - my trail. Buoyed by the generosity of my colleagues and friends I attacked it with determination. Refreshed, having had that bath, and sat more comfortably in clean clothes and the stark reality of what I've let myself in for truely dawns. Crap. Nine days to go. Fingers crossed it won't take me that long to get across the finish line.
www.justgiving.com/Ben-Barnett
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