How life is supposed to be.

Well I know you all - OK, both of you (I notice readership has fallen a little since the end of the race, when I slacked off blogging) - are wondering how it was to restart the running. The important thing, as it presents itself to my mind, is that I restarted running on 31 December. This was critical to me, and I'll tell you why. I hate New Year's Resolutions. I mean, I really hate them. I have never successfully kept a New Year's Resolution, and the period that elapses between making and breaking them has varied, over the years, from a couple of months at best, to hours, at worst. The long and the short of it is that New Year's Resolutions do nothing but make me feel like a failure, and I hate them. A few years ago, I made my mind up to put myself out of this mental anguish, and stop making New Year's Resolutions, sometime back in 2003. Ironically, it was, in fact, a New Year's Resolution. Distressingly, I broke it two years ago in 2010. I resolved to write a poem every month for my poetry group, Pint of Poetry (OK, that's an old link - find us on Facebook). What a stupid resolution! I was bound to fail, and I did fail, about 2 months in. Confirming my notion that New Year's Resolutions make you doomed to failure. And, by making it, I had failed to keep the only resolution I've ever kept for more than a year. (I'm reinstating it for 2012, although I'm no longer sure of its validity.)

Anyway, that was quite a long way of pointing out that it was absolutely mission critical to me, and my long-term strategic success as a runner, to not start running again in the New Year. Not even if I didn't officially say it was a New Year's Resolution, because it might be thought of as one. So, I'd gone for a run just before Christmas, admittedly partly to get out of the house, but also because my cousin Erica proposed that I run the Hastings Half marathon with her on 25th March, which I agreed to. I realised that there is only one way I will continue with training, and that is to have a goal that I at least think I may enjoy. I am already terrified of this however - Hastings is really a lot more hilly than Peterborough. This is the profile for Hastings:

The profile for Peterborough you can find somewhere online, but essentially it is just a horizontal line. I also realise that I told Jeanette, in a moment of exuberance, that I would run the Coniston 14, but in fact this is on 31 March. I may have to consult the Oracle on whether it is a poor idea to run (a little more than) a half marathon only a week after running a different race. I mean, clearly it IS possible - if Eddie Izzard can run 43 marathons in 51 days, we can assume it is possible for me to run a half marathon after a week's rest - but you know, I take Sal's advice very seriously. Except for when she says "of course you can".
Anyway, I'm seriously digressing. The point was, I have an aim, and I started training before New Year. That was simple, right? But I had plans to be up in Manchester for New Year, and in a grave effort to not overpack, and suspecting that, realistically, I wouldn't actually have time to go running, I unpacked my running stuff (having found that my overnight bag wouldn't close). THEN on New Year's Eve, during our plans to take a trip to Dunham Massey, found that two of my friends were wanting to run there! Of course I agreed to go too, even though Sally would have shot me if she'd known which shoes I ran in. Doubtless they were the reason I was the slowest. Anyway, it was three miles there, and I have no idea what speed we were going at, but Mikey and Seirian had to hold back somewhat to allow me to keep up. This is OK. I learned at an early age that some people run faster than others. I've enjoyed being an adult so much more since I found out that it doesn't matter. When we arrived, we reunited with the others, played with the kids, and went and found a really tasty bowl of soup for lunch. Then followed it up with a massive scone, with cream, jam and a pot of tea.

Mikey, Seirian and I then ran home again, and I'm happy to report that the cream tea appeared to slow them down somewhat. It was either that, or the somewhat more perilous route we took back, along the edge of a canal, which was particularly muddy. My shoes came into their own. Right before we left the canal, it started to rain. Which was refreshing. I came in third, again, but happy to have acheived a 6.5 mile run before the New Year.

I can't see Sal incorporating this into her training programmes, but I think stopping for a cream tea is definitely the way to go with running. It's the way life was supposed to be.

**Interim**

Well, first off, apologies. I've let you all down. After the amazing vote of confidence I received on Facebook, where if memory serves me correctly (and it's stretching the little grey cells by several months now) at least 18 people voted by means of hitting **like** on my status, that I should carry on blogging. No one seemed remotely concerned about the running.

But I was concerned, and I'll tell you why: politely, most people have feigned not to notice (once again, my mother stands out as the exception here) but over the past few years, I've been carrying at least a stone of extra weight. I know, it's my height, I hide it well. But it's bothered me, on and off, especially when trying on clothes.

Now, happily in this instance, (although the times when it is a blessing is actually pretty limited) I have an aversion to throwing stuff away, and this applies moreso to clothes than other junk (although it certainly isn't in any way restricted to clothes). This is in fact, my mother's fault - she has never thrown away anything that "still wear in it". My sisters appear to deal with this childhood trauma of understanding that throwing away clothes that still have wear in them, by donating their clothes to my mother. But I'm not so crass.  I keep all mine. This has been fab, because over the passed few months it's dawned on me that I can actually fit into clothes that I bought over 10 years ago. Woo-hoo!

And then Christmas arrived, when the average person eats 6000 calories in one day. And I'm no average person.

So, to keep you in the picture, I think I went running about twice between completing the Great Eastern Run and Christmas. And I failed you all by not blogging either of them. But I'm back. New strategy. New race.... welcome to the Hastings Half.