Run along Sonny

The nights are drawing in in Brisbane now - we're fairly close to the equator so the sunset shifts from around 7.30pm at mid-summer to 5ish at mid-winter. Work is also pretty hectic at the minute so by the time I get home it's hard to drag myself out to do anything and I'm starting to feel my body complaining about the lack of exercise. Fortunately Brisbane winters are perfect for running. I used to say that running was for people who were too poor to ride bikes & too uncoordinated to skate, but last year we had a corporate entry in the City To Surf charity run in Sydney (I'll talk about that in a later blog) and as part of the training for that I learned to enjoy running.

It's a wierd pursuit though. It delivers a pretty good exercise bang for your buck but it takes a toll on your body, especially if you have fitness from other sports. If you have cardio fitness from something like riding or skating then you're likely to be expecting to reach the same feelings of exhaustion, but your joints will give out long before your lungs. You should always break your body in gently with a fast walk, slowly adding short running sections and extending the distance by no more than 10% a week.

Naturally if you're a bloke you know all this but you will still go out and try to run the way you used to one, two or many years ago. Despite not running since an early morning jog through Hong Kong one November morning last year I tried to run my old 'short' 5km training run tonight. I probably made it just over half way through before listening to my shins & knees and walking home. Still it was a beautiful night to be out - lovely clear star-studded skies, a slightly cool bite to the air to keep you comfortable and that smug & slightly illicit feeling of quietly passing past all those TV-illuminated houses.

If I can survive the pain I'll go through tomorrow (and of course I'll do it in my traditionally stoic manner with hardly a complaint) then I'd like to continue to run, once a week or so. You seem to be able to get a couple of hours worth of thinking into a 40 minute run / walk, although to be fair most of that thinking revolves around 'ouch my knees, oooh my ankles, blimey my legs hurt'. Last year I also did some trail running and although that requires another level of fitness again it's also a lot more fun so I might try to work towards that. Although there are obvious drawbacks as well...(just don't show this to anyone)