Running Out of Steam

It’s only 41 short days now until I get to show off my lack of physical prowess to the good people of Peterborough when I take to the streets for the Great Eastern (Fun) Run. I’ve added the hyperlink so that you can look at the website should you choose and to see the alarming countdown timer.

OK, so it’s all fine, but I have my concerns. I am only traversing a short distance, especially given that the full run is 13.1 miles. I am only doing about 2.5. What surprises me is that, whilst 2.5 miles is much better than the 20 metres I could only manage back in February before running out of steam, I still feel that I should be able to do more. 

A colleague of mine is doing a half marathon next month and has only recently started training, however she casually remarks how she went out for a run for an hour. An hour? I can do 35 minutes, but not easily. I have a remarkable ability to make running 2.5 miles look incredibly difficult. I certainly couldn’t get to the end of my run and think to myself, you know what, I think I’ll just keep going for another 30 minutes, maybe even an hour. By the time I’m finished all the moisture in my body has been sweated out and my heart is beating out a salsa rhythm.

Tomorrow we go on holiday, to sunny Majorca, with some friends. I have good intentions to keep up my running but given that the temperature over there is reaching highs of 35 degrees Celsius I’m more likely to be hidden from the burning sun under a beach umbrella and ploughing my way through the turgid bore-a-thon that is ‘Atonement’. Seriously, does anything actually happen in that book? Does there need to be so much tedious descriptions of all the minutiae? Thomas Hardy was bad for that but at least he stuck in a few more twists and turns along the way in between describing the rolling Wessex countryside.

My other issue is more delicate and personal, but one that came close to thwarting my new found running activities. 

I took a trip to a sports shop on Sunday afternoon. It’s not my natural habitat I grant you, as I fall into neither category of an incredibly fit person who is looking for clothes in x-small, and neither do I fall in to the category of a dangerously overweight individual who wears cheap sportswear because they can’t squeeze their corpulent body into normal clothes, however without my recent bursts of exercise I was fast heading in that direction. I think the turning point was when I found myself idly browsing the Jacamo website and suddenly realising that I really had to change my ways.

So I’d gone searching for a new pair of running shorts and settled on a particularly comfy pair that were a little shorter in the leg than the ones I have at the moment. 

Just before you ask they were not lycra shorts. No-one needs to see that. 

Their shortness in the leg seemed to surprise and startle the present Mrs Hayward when she saw me modelling them. She explained that it looked like I was going out running in a pair of boxer shorts. Frankly I’ve seen far more bizarre sights on the streets of Bourne so this did not concern me overly.

I should have listened to her though as my problem did, in the end, come from the shortness of said shorts as the first time I wore them I encountered some unfortunate chafing. 

So there I was on Monday evening looking up ‘chafing thighs’ on Google which feels somehow dirty and wrong but I was heartened to find that this was not an uncommon problem amongst us athletes and various solutions were offered on the Runners World forum, including the liberal application of Vaseline. 

My solution to this burning issue for now is to go back to my original longer shorts and wait until my thighs become less flabby. That seems sensible in the circumstances. Greasing myself up before a run is just not an option, especially as I’m concerned as to what happens to the Vaseline once I start sweating. 

The good people of Bourne, whilst used to unusual sights, might still be quite alarmed to see me panting my way down the road whilst white slime trickles down my inner thighs. The slimy leg guy is a moniker that I really don’t want to get in a small town.

Despite these issues I shall persevere. As the present Mrs Hayward wisely said to me, “If it was easy everyone would be doing it”. This is true, but I just wish the others that are doing it could make it look a little harder.