Janathon Day 30 – they think it’s all over

It is now.

Inspired by Misty2k to do more than what I’d planned, which was a short lumber around the block but not wishing to Radcliffe, I remembered that a couple of years ago when I was training for the Bexhill 10k I worked out a PTR that was around 3k long.

PTR is a public toilet run for those who don’t know, and it’s a route that allows the hapless runner to feel relatively confident that they will make it to a convenience in time, if they have tummy issues.

So I PTRd today and it was fine. Didn’t need the PT bit at all.

Stats for lovely Jules for the last time

• Distance - 3.11k
• Time – immaterial
• Radcliffes – zero
• Things learned – if you run for 30 days in a row you end up with abs that would break Ray Winstone’s knuckles; a strict running regime doesn’t necessarily flush a recalcitrant protagonist out of hiding (although I am just starting to get a hint on how to proceed with the rewrite of the novel); challenges are fun; top quality chocolate is essential to active running (I already knew that but it’s worth restating); you meet nicer people out running than almost any other way.


PS - in fact my abs would shatter the knuckles of any action hero of choice, so I've given you three plus Spielberg to choose from ...

PPS - picture courtesy of TVSquadJulia

Janathon Day 30 – the ouch day

Today I failed to run. Well I managed .3km which hardly counts as a run (let’s not talk about how many 60 m sprints that is or Mark Lewis-Francis will start to feel tired) for a distance runner.

The thing is, I woke up with three kinds of ill this morning: migraine (instantly treatable with wonderful sumitriptan); a cold (so it’s just a blocked nose and a sore throat, that doesn’t stop anybody running) and a stomach bug. Stomach bugs stop you running. Well, they let you run 300 metres and then they stop you and you walk back very slowly and carefully and spend the next hour or so in the smallest room.

I did manage to get to the allotment, where I put in a hearty 20 minutes painting the inside of the shed, and then I had to go home to the smallest room again.

My janathon is about to end ingloriously … and today my end is pretty inglorious too!

Even Mickier Run

Shorter, dirtier, Mickier and Rourkier!
1.2 k

Had to shove this run in betweeen a meeting, coffee with lovely friends, son's birthday present opening, and heading for cinema.

Thanks Mickey ...

Day 28 – the ‘wind like a scythe day’

That’s external wind, not internal, by the way. (Stats at the bottom for the lovely Jules.)

We (Rebus and I) went up to the windmill to run. The ground was frozen, which makes running slightly easier up there, when quite a lot of the year the ground is churned mud, and the wind was the kind of wind that you could just lean on and not fall over, except that if you did lean on it, you’d probably end up with a permafrosted front.

It was so cold and windy that even the dog tried to slip stream – usually he runs 50 metres ahead of me. Several disgruntled crows were hanging around in a huddled fashion that suggested they would be cuddling up to each other if they didn’t have to maintain their street cred.

My piriformis decided that this was the time to introduce a slow hot ache to the proceedings. For a kilometre or so I welcomed this, as the only warmth to be found in the proceedings and then it got too much and I decided to turn round and head back the short way. Such bliss to have the wind behind us!

Distance - 1.4 k
Temperature – Siberian
Crows – chilly
Windmill – spectacular.

Day 27 – another lottie runner day

Stats at the bottom for lovely checkers.

I ran to the allotment on the basis that when I got there I would get changed into my boots and jacket (stored there) and do some work before friends turned up to collect some mirrors and walking sticks (don’t ask!) and then I would run home again.

First mistake. I forgot we’d taken the roof off the shed because it was made of asbestos, and replaced it with a tarpaulin until we can get a proper roof. As a result, my boots had been dripped on. I wasn’t going to wear my Sauconys to dig in so we feet it was – urgh. Second mistake, in pulling on my old leather (actually somebody else’s old leather, then my teenage son’s leather, then my leather, so at least third hand) I pushed my arm up in the air and hit one of the pockets of water that had gathered in the tarpaulin that is acting as the shed roof, managed to hit it hard enough to either create a new hole or to dislodge something (dead leaf?) that was acting as a blockage, thus showering myself with icy water, right down the sleeve of my jacket.

I started to plant out the alpine strawberries and as I did, it began to snow. Seriously. Wet feet, wet arm, snow.

Can’t tell you how glad I was to take off my wet boots and socks, pull on my running socks and Sauconys, hang up my sodden jacket (now smelling of dead wet cow) and run home.

Distance – 1.98 k
Weather – snow
Mood – disgruntled
Strawberries planted – 7.

Janathon Day 26 – another 'running with friends' day

This is the second Wednesday I’ve run with my friend who is new to running. Sadly she had some hip pain from an old injury (could be piriformis, could a labrum problem, suggested she goes to her GP for some advice) so we walked a little more this time. She enjoyed it though, and has definitely improved her overall fitness as she’s been doing some of the stretches I showed her last week and her shoulder movement is much looser and more efficient.

We managed 2k again, including a detour to play with a couple of those body weight machines that they have installed in Hove Park. They are quite good fun and for a new runner in particular, they make a great stopping point to restore breathing to rest levels.

As for me, I also have piriformis pain, but I’m doing my physio twice a day and keeping it at bay. I think I’ll need some ultrasound if I’m to get back into race training but that’s for once Janathon is over.

Janathon success, computer fail

stats - 1.89 k run

computer, borked all day. First a virus, then a network adaptor problem, hence plenty of time to run, no time to work or blog.

Phew. It's. Been. A. Tough. Day.

Bed.

(Actually, bed with Bill Sienkiewicz. Not actually 'with' but with Stray Toasters, which I am currently loving to death, crumbs and raven, although I wouldn't say no to actually 'with' either)

Day 24 - the pulling parsnips run

Another 1 k run.

I am starting to feel that my runs are just being squeezed into the corners of my day, which is sad, but it just goes to prove that even if it were physically possible for me to run every day (which it’s not) then logistically it would be impossible. Roll on 31 January.

Anyway, today’s run was followed by parsnip curry. The parsnips, leeks, shallots and coriander seeds came from the allotment, but the red onions and the orange pepper were from the supermarket because we've used up all our stored onions and our frozen peppers. I fried previously cooked wholemeal basmati rice with cashews and crushed coriander seeds to give fragrance to the mixture – next year I hope to be able to use home-grown lemongrass to make my own jasmine rice instead.

It was delicious.

Janathon Day 23 – the ’squeezed into the day’ run

Today is another day that my run got squeezed. In fact at around 6pm I thought I was going to have to declare it a non-running day.

We started by going to a local garden centre to buy seed potatoes. Then to the allotment to move loads of strawberries to their new home, transplant lavender and have an enormous bonfire.

It was gigantic. It could probably be felt the other side of Hove. Between digging up and replanting, moving barrowloads of manure, finding several marble work surfaces buried under the ground and having to dig them out (in pieces) and generally hauling wood around for the fire, I was exhausted by the time we got home at around 5pm. But somehow I dragged my unwilling carcass out of the door for a 1 km run. It took eight minutes. That’s it.

Janathon Day 22 - Thongs and other issues

Stats:
• Distance 1.89 k
• Time -immaterial
• Weather – parky

So once again I ran round Hove Park. OH got to do the bit today that I did yesterday as in I drove there so he could run at race pace down to the park, round the park and then be driven home. All very nice.

On the way – running in opposite directions so as not to annoy each other – he saw a Cairn terrier and stopped to say hello to it. I saw a thong.

It was a pink and black thong, in the undergrowth at the Engineerium end of the park. That’s the kind of thing—at this time of year—that makes you take a quick detour to check that they aren’t any other garments: or worse, body parts, lurking out of sight. Well, it makes me detour, you might be more dedicated a runner, more sensitive a soul, or less ghoulish an imaginer.

• I once saw what I thought was a set of finger bones in the mulch under trees on the Waterhall road: it wasn’t, it was one of those glow in the dark creepy hands, probably thrown out of a car window, but it inspired a story (which I haven’t sold yet) about a woman who does find a skeletonised hand in the woods but has her own reasons for not telling anybody … (that's one of Ren Holton's stories if you happen to be a horror mag looking for a suspense filled psychological tale)
• And I once found a pair of seamed stockings on a run – they were tied, lovingly, in a bow, around one of those yellow utility markers you find on the side of the road. That led to a story (which appeared in an erotica anthology) about a young woman who ‘earns’ a pair of black market silk stockings on Victory in Japan Day. (That's one of Carmel's and it's in the Breast Cancer antho put together by Xcite Books)

There was nothing in the undergrowth of the park other than the thong, and it has obviously been there for a looongish time. Two or three weeks, maybe even before Christmas, which would make a certain kind of sense, given that it was a piece of party underwear if ever I saw one: by which I mean it looked incredibly uncomfortable and faintly tacky.

It reminded me again that my mind doesn’t work like other peoples’. Possibly the Cairn terrier had left the park before it crossed my path, or I would definitely have said hello to it too. But OH did not see the thong. From the pristine condition of the mud under the trees, nobody else but me had bothered, if they did see it, to explore whether there was anything else to be seen. I often think it would be nice to have the kind of mind that didn’t build ghastly worst-case scenarios out of random objects, but then, what would I have to write about?

PS - this is not the thong. The thong I saw was tackier, dirtier and quite a bit saggier!

Day 21 – the ‘just for the love of it, day’

Stats at the bottom for checkers.

Today was always going to be a horrible crunch, even before I added in a random side trip to complicate things. I knew that fitting in a run would be difficult so it worked out like this:

Drive dog to groomer, do quick shop for essential groceries (that was the side trip), drive home, leave car and run to allotment, work for two hours digging up strawberries from one plot and replanting them on another plot several hundred yards away amongst other things, run home, drive to groomer, pick up dog, drive home, leave clean dog at home, walk back to allotment, work for another hour, get lift home with OH, have shower, put on clean clothing and respectable face, pick up friend in car, drive both of us to The Garden House in Brighton, spend several hours being made to feel delightfully inadequate by the elegant, compact and highly winter-scented garden there, eat cake and drink tea, drive friend home, have cup of tea with her, drive self home, walk dog, cook dinner (using essential groceries to make chocolate and mandarin bread pudding) and collapse …

• 1.98 k
• And just a tiny boast here … my km time on the outward run was 6.07. Not bad eh?

Janathon day 20 - the height of feebleness

1.2 kilometres jogged.

What can I say? The day got away from me: I frittered it away in idle pursuits and pleasure-seeking, felting clouds, talking to cats (this is the Siamese who talks back) and buying beads and by the time I remembered I had to run there was ham cooked in cola waiting to be eaten and mandarin and chocolate bread needing to be buttered for afters, and I did the bare minimum of exercise to meet my Janathon commitments.

I am a lazy cow today - so bite me!

Janathon Day 19 – the ‘like a virgin’ day

Today’s run was a 2 kilometre run/walk around Hove Park with a new runner. In fact, rather oddly, she’s somebody who might be hiring me as a running/yoga coach. Me!

Although it’s not as odd as all that. I qualified as a yoga teacher in 1987, and I’ve taught on and off ever since. Mainly off, to be honest, because I prefer to perform my asanas alone. But nobody has ever suggested I could coach them at running before.

Still we started with a gentle approach to fartlek and took it in turns to set a landmark to run to, and the pace we ran at. Her pace when running was faster than I would have set, which is what I expected, as most new runners start off faster than they can continue to run at. We explored running at a pace you can talk at, and running too fast to talk and then allowing the breathing to return to normal before increasing the pace again. It seemed to go well and she was very surprised (and pleased) to find she’d covered 2k without really noticing. Then back to her place for a couple of stretches that I hope will work to prevent her hip problem (sounds vaguely sciatic) recurring and we’ll see how she’s feeling tomorrow.

As for me, I feel great! It’s humbling to realise just how much I take my ability to run and do other forms of exercise for granted, and that I simply don’t appreciate, very often, how lucky I am to have the time, space, ability and training to indulge my various physical activities to the full. For the rest of the month I shall try to remember that running is a privilege and to enjoy it as such.

Janathon Day 18 - the miraculous properties of new kit

As a writer I know the power of the new notebook – sometimes beneficent, sometimes malign. A fresh notebook can spark a new project, or condemn a writer to the blank white shyness of the empty page through writer’s block.

For me it's always the former with writing - new notebook, and the words just pour out. Not necessarily good words (my first drafts are excremental) but still, lots of them.

So it is with running kit.

Yesterday’s knee twist kept me awake all night with intermittent bouts of pain subsiding into just twinges and then flaring up again. But this morning my shocking pink do-rag (officially named a multi-purpose headgear) arrived in the post and there was no way I wasn’t going to do it justice. I tied it in a pirate, because I can, put on my iPod Nano, and went for it.

End result?

• Distance – 2.78 k
• Time – actually pretty good, considering
• Pain – eminently bearable
• Mood – happy
• Music – AC/DC Back in Black, Caravan Palace La Villette and Hassan Abou Seoud’s classic Shik Shak Shok.

Janathon Day 17 – are we there yet?

Sadly not. Today’s run was a bit of a bugger. Stats at bottom of blog-post.

I decided that today I would run early in the morning with Rebus the dog. Rebus approved of this as he didn’t get taken for a long walk yesterday, and was as raring to go as a ten-year-old Cairn terrier can be.

So we drove down to Benfield and immediately I knew that I should have been wearing spikes. Not that I’ve worn spikes since I was fourteen, but the slippery, cold, tractionless mud that was lurking under equally slippery, slightly rotten and very wet long grass suggested spikes would have been a good option.

But what the hell, I went for it. And all was going extremely well until a pair of wood pigeons came racketing out of a blackthorn bush right under Rebus’s nose (if you know the size of a Cairn you’ll realise that the pigeons were more running with their wings out than flying) and the poor dog, totally disconcerted by this, reared up on his hind legs, barking as if he’d run through broken glass. This happened once at Benfield and it was a bloody experience in every sense of the word, so I immediately tried to stop on the spot, and – of course – my front leg locked out and skidded across the mud and now I have an odd, nagging, imprecise pain on the outside of my right knee.

I am RICE and hoping I can still run tomorrow.

• Distance - 1.82 km
• Time – no idea
• Accidents – one
• Mud – copious
• Mood – belligerent. If anybody has an email for Dastardly and Muttley, I’d like to introduce them to some pigeons …

Day 16 Long Ralk with lunch in prospect

Stats at the bottom for janathon checker-person who should get double-karma-blessings for working on a Sunday.

Today was a run-walk (a ralk, in our house) with @pinkyandnobrain. Also lunch. When I woke up it wasn’t raining. When I walked the dog it still wasn’t raining! I was so surprised by this that I crocheted a cloud.

The cloud has to be felted, have some raindrops attached, and then be joined by another little cloud, and then I will have two cloud brooches to wear. Alternatively the whole experiment may go horribly wrong (as often happens with freeform crochet) and you may hear no more about it. We’ll see.

Before @pinkyandnobrain arrived I marinated a chicken in lemon juice and rubbed the cavity with zest. Then it was coated in butter, olive oil and a little water and cooked in a very hot oven for 20 minutes while we chatted and got changed. The oven temperature was lowered and we set off. We walked from the bottom of 3-Cornered Copse to the top, then ran Green Ridge to the windmill and back to 3-Cornered Copse (the return journey being against a stiff wind) and all the way back down. It still wasn't raining.

When we got home I beat two eggs with some Greek yoghurt and some more water and poured it over the chicken. After 15 minutes this forms a thick and rather ugly looking omelette affair which tastes utterly delicious. It’s a Cretan recipe, apparently. Well done those Greeks!

Well done to us too, as we managed:

• Distance - 4.1 k
• Time – quite reasonable, considering
• Conversation – serial killers; administration of charities; running shoes; travel agents; solitude; Nietzsche; fashion; dog walkers; MA studies; family gatherings; Moomins
• Pudding – chicory essence and walnut mini-muffins with vanilla ice-cream.

Day 15 – non-running but high impact exercise day

So I gave myself a day off running. Not a day off, just off running. And there were three reasons for this:

1. Yesterday’s mmmph was a sign that I’m getting bored. Boredom has killed the runner in me many a time and I don’t want to get so sick of running that I get to the end of January and then don’t run again until September
2. I had a packed day planned for today and the only run I could have fitted in would have been a rubbishy rushed and pointless one
3. Tomorrow I am taking a nice long ralk (run/walk) with a friend, weather permitting, so my legs were about due a rest day.

Sort of a rest day, anyway. Instead of running OH and I tackled the thing at the top of the blog post. It was once an elder tree, then the stump of an elder tree on our allotment. We cut it down in June and have been lighting fires over it from November to kill it off properly. Now it was time to make it part of the grand design!

The grand design is circular, mainly because said elder is just one of five trees that we’ve had to remove from the allotment, and that means that planting in rows is impossible: just about every inch of soil has at least one tree root in it, and some areas will be unplantable for years, until we’ve managed to dig out the huge roots that spider across the ground. Planting in the areas that can be used is going to be a little haphazard, but now this elder is an ex-tree, I’m going to use it space between the roots to plant strawberries and herbs in this round planter thingy.

The circles can’t be concentric because of the roots, so they will have this eccentric pattern that’s hopefully making the best use of the available soil but also interesting to look at. The execution of this particular project required five barrowloads of topsoil, two of manure and a bag of sand, plus a lot of heavy digging. In between bouts of digging and barrowing we moved one old incinerator, some sheet metal and a rotten old carpet up to the skips in the centre of the site, and then went for a little walk with an allotment neighbour to see a plot that he’s working on. We spent two hours on site, with one break for tea, so I’d say 100 minutes of intense load-bearing, cardiovascular exercise. Sorry, dear stat checker, not sure how to bullet point that!

Day 14 – janathon meh

Stats only today. I’m fed up with everything.

• Distance - 2.65 k
• Time – unknown and uncared about
• Mood – grumpy.

Grumpy cat by jonnykeelty

Day 13 – the 'danger of magical thinking during a run' day

Stats at the bottom, such as they are.

Magical thinking – many of us are guilty of it. In one of those serendipities that can seem miraculous, I was writing about the process of magical thinking in alcoholics for a client today and then found myself indulging in the same process myself. That, in itself, is a bit of magical thinking.

Magical thinking is when we mentally connect two (often closely occurring) events as though one caused the other, without a logical or empirical causal link. For example, if you walked under a ladder and then your granny died, you might associate the ‘bad luck’ of ladders with death. Alcoholics often ‘reward’ themselves with drinks for something they’ve done that was difficult, because their magical thinking suggests that drinks that are ‘earned’ don’t count.

So, I have some magical thinking habits, one of which is that when things are going really well for me, I can ward off the bad luck that must inevitably be heading my way, by ‘investing’ in some ‘bad luck’ through choice.

So today, when life feels pretty good, my excellent agent has said nice things to me, my also excellent editor has said good things about my soon-to-be-revealed book cover, my very cool publicity person has come up with a potentially great opportunity to talk about the book, and my lovely friend has had good news about her severely ill father, I look at the weather, which is rainy, foggy and windy (a combination that should surely defy meteorological likelihood) and with some satisfaction, put off my run until it is also dark, on the basis that running through dark, foggy, windy, rain is likely to earn my whatever the opposite is of the good events that have happened recently, so nothing unexpectedly bad will happen because I’ve planned the bad into my schedule. Yeah, like that's going to work!

• Distance - 1.53k
• Time - unknown
• Weather - atrocious
• Magical thinking – indulged.

Witchdoctor photo courtesy of Bogdan Migulsky

Day 12 – the ‘run misty for me’ day

Stats at bottom for checkers

There’s something really magical about running through mist. Or is it fog? I never know which is which.

Anyway, I ran early today and enjoyed the muffling, mysterious experience of having the sound of my footsteps softened, the streetlights haloed by opal light and the crows cawing discontentedly and invisibly. To lower the tone, I really hate the way my hair does an impression of an elderly and weather-damaged bluebell when the humidity is high. It clings to my head and then springs out in random directions as if I’d been the victim of an attack by violent curling tongs.

• Distance - 1.56 k
• Weather – misty.

Janathon Day 11 – the keeping company day

Stats at the bottom for the lovely Janathon checkers.

Today I ran with @janathon_ - a shortish loop from Jew Street (where we left our non-running kid with the excellent folks from New Writing South: you know you belong to a really good membership organisation when they act as bag-minders so you can Janathon!) down to Old Steine, along the seafront by the West Pier, and then back.

Because we couldn’t get a signal we aren’t sure about distance, and we were also meeting for the first time, so it had to be a slow enough run to talk. We ate lunch at Bill’s and then went down to Boho Gelato for pudding (chocolate and blood orange ice-cream for me, half and half of chocolate chilli and mince pie ice-cream for Cathy) before a swift walk back up to the train. It was fun!


I get really nervous about running with people I don’t know, but once I start it’s usually great and this time was no exception. The West Pier looked particularly fine today, although the photo is from Sunday because I didn’t have a camera on me.

• Distance 2.2 k (but we think it was really 3 k at least because it took so long to get a signal)
• Time – very slow
• Mood – nervous becoming relaxed
• Food – lots!

Janathon Day 10 – the ‘don’t bloody ask’ day!

This is how bad it was – I’m giving you a choice of my janathon misery or a good laugh and I’d strongly recommend the laugh.

Stats:

• Distance - 1.45k
• Mood – frustration turning to fear, becoming fury and veering hysteria-wards later
• Backstory – complicated.

To begin at the beginning. I actually managed to forget I had to run today, until a tweet reminded me. As I’d planned an entire day without time for a run, this was a bit of a bastard. Frustration arrived.

Then, in faffing around trying to work out how to fit in a run, I accidentally invited another Janathon participant to run with me before we go out for lunch. So this is running, with a stranger, who’s intimately involved in the Janathon project, through central Brighton. I must have gone insane. But by the time the momentary insanity wore off she’d agreed and I’d found a place for us to leave our bags so we could run unimpeded. Hello fear.

So to reset my mood, I ran. I picked 3-Cornered Copse for two reasons: 1 – it is out of the wind and Brighton has become gale city today and 2 – it’s a steep hill and I always feel better if I run up there. But when I got home, I discovered I’d run through dogshit, and as I only have one pair if running shoes at present, this meant I had to scrub my shoes clean because I have to wear them tomorrow. Fury took up residence in my soul.

And while I was scrubbing my shoes, outside, over the drain, it started to rain. An icy, sleety, bitter-stinging rain. And I wanted to howl at the sky but I feared that if I did I would end up in Mill Hill (local mental health facility) and that would mean the end of my Janathon. So hysteria (the silent kind) moved in.

And now I’d advise you to go and have a laugh while you can, because if this is my ‘don’t ask’ day, and you haven’t had yours yet, it can only be just around the corner.

Day 9 – Landscape with runners (after Brueghel)

So much I want to write about today! The picture, and the fact that I am lucky enough to have four windmills within running distance of my home; the joy of running on a crisp morning; the horror of piriformis syndrome, and why Iain M Banks is my go-to author for this particular problem.

So let’s try and be brief (who am I kidding?) and take it chronologically. Piriformis first. I knew part-way through yesterday afternoon that I was in trouble. Attending big events is fun but it does mean sitting in airless and windowless rooms, which makes me antsy, but that wasn’t yesterday’s problem. The problem was those little gilt and velvet chairs they give you to sit on, which look cute but are ergonomically hazardous. I got up and stood around for a couple of hours but there was still most of the evening to go and I was getting that hollow aching pain that told me that my piriformis did not love me.

I should have gone home and done physio exercises until I was sobbing with pain and exhaustion but I didn’t want to. I compromised by finding an empty room and doing half an hour of stretches, but there’s a limit to what you can do in your going-out clothes, particularly if random strangers are going to keep bursting through the door looking for the toilets, or the cigarette machine, or the person they’ve made an assignation with. (Or possibly, by the third one, simply being tipped off that there's a female contortionist warming up in that room over there and if you nip in you can get an interesting eyeful!)

So this morning my piriformis actively hates me. The good news is that piriformis syndrome is easily treatable with sports massage to break down the tissue damage and excruciatingly painful physiotherapy.

Which brings me to Iain M Banks. Today’s plan is a short run and five bouts of physio. During the run I saw this lovely line of other runners looking like a Brueghel painting brought up to date, and was very glad to that I usually run alone. I’m sure they were having a great time (although I know I wouldn’t have been) but I was thankful that I was a solo runner and could do my piffling run (details below) while chanting my mantra for the pain to come. The pain is not the run, you see, it’s the physiotherapy, and to prepare myself for its particular torments I mutter ‘Use of Weapons, Use of Weapons’ to myself.

Those who don’t read science fiction may now wish to skip to the bullet points. For everybody else’s benefit, and without spoilers, if you’ve read Use of Weapons you will already have guessed why I chant that particular novel’s title when contemplating pain, but if you haven’t read it, one weapon used in the book is a chair made of human bones.

I’m never sure whether I’m threatening my body with a fate worse than physio or reminding myself that there are people out their with minds as bad (if not worse) than mine (see day 1) who would probably find some creative value in the pain I’m about to put myself through. Whatever the logic or lack of it, the chant, which is actually more of a mumble, has become a habit, and I use it for shin splints, piriformis syndrome and leg cramps. Also when I bang my funny-bone, but only after I’ve said some much riper things, much more loudly.

• Distance - 2.34 k
• Time - immaterial
• Air quality – like a chilled Bolla Souave Classico – less fizzy than a champagne but definitely in that region of crispness
• Pain – distinct but bearable
• Windmill – Patcham (the others are Blatchington mill and the paired mills, Jack and Jill, at Clayton)

Now to the physio …

PS - you're all clever enough to know I mean the photo was reminiscent of the Brueghel school of mass participation events in a landscape, aren't you? Not that the runners are chasing somebody called Breughel? Yeah, I knew you were, really.

Day 8 – the Mickey Rourke of runs

Why Mickey Rourke? Because it was quick, short and rather dirty.

The details:

• 1.03 k
• Very early in the morning
• Orchestrated by Aphex Twin (Outside Kick Ass Violin Solo to be precise) and The Commitments (Mustang Sally)

So here’s the reason. I have to be in Brighton – coffee with the author of this excellent blog wherein intellectualising music choices is neatly parsed, then a convention all day. I could have run at lunchtime but that would have been (a) poseurish (as in ‘excuse me while I take my exercise in public thus sending all you drinkers and smokers to the naughty corner) and (b) required me to carry my kit into town and then ask somebody else to watch my stuff while I ran and that’s not fair when everybody’s trying to eat and socialise (and maybe hook up or have a fag or whatever, who am I to judge?) and so on. Also, it would have meant being sweaty through the afternoon.

It was actually 2.04 k because I walked it first with the dog, then ran it while he ate his breakfast at home. And I did it at race pace (for me) of nine minute miles.

Now I’m off to have fun!

Mickey by David_Shankbone

Janathon Day 7 - the demotivation Dalek strikes

Motivation was a problem today. This couldn’t get me out of the door, even though I wasn’t going to let myself eat it until I got home – it’s a Hotel Chocolat 5-second Chilli and it was delicious although, if I’m being totally honest, I think the praline was just a little too heavy for the chilli warmth and impeded the full value of the spicy burn. It was morning, the sun was shining, I had forty minutes to spare and I just couldn’t be arsed to run.

Nor could this, which is a less elegant but more substantial inducement in the form of a mandarin cupcake. I made them last night and they masquerade as healthy treats (okay, healthier treats) having half wholemeal flour, unrefined cane sugar and half a pulped mandarin in the sponge and the mandarin zest in the icing. Nope, still didn’t inspire me with the desire to get up and run. By now it was early lunchtime, and sky was clouding over, and the temperature dropping, but I wasn’t in the right headspace to run, I told myself.

By three-thirty it was chucking it down. I logged onto twitter for some tough love, got it, and ran

I ran 2.9 k in driving rain. A more sensible runner would have run in the sunshine but there you go, nobody said I was sensible. And why all this running resistance? Had I hit the wall? Nothing like that. And those who are runners rather than writers might want to stop reading now, because it’s going to get weird.

The thing is, I’m using Janathon, or trying to, to force a character to stop hiding from me. It’s the third major rewrite of my novel, after discussion with a very distinguished editor, who had eminently intelligent things to say about the plotline. I’m at just over 60,000 words and the protagonist has stopped cooperating. She liked her previous life, I think, with a warm and honourable love interest and only one death on her conscience while in the new life her love interest is somewhat warped and twisted and there are two deaths, one of them emotionally brutal, the other physically so. So she keeps sliding back into the character traits of that previous persona, which makes a nonsense of the narrative arc as I’ve reconstructed it.

The reason I know she’s hiding is that I’m not dreaming as her. Yes, that’s right. As her. I’ve discussed this with the inimitable Hilary Mantel who hears her characters’ voices and given a choice of the two I’m happy to dream as my characters. Dreaming as men is really rather interesting if physiologically dislocating …

So the hard work of running and the hard work of daily blogging, is supposed to push me into a state of exhaustion where I hope that my subconscious will flush the protag out of her nocturnal hiding place and get her back on track. I would like to finish this novel’s new incarnation before the allotment book gets published, but so far all that’s happening is a nagging pain in my knee and some rather odd nightmares about sheep which I know are being caused by the fact that I’m reading a sheep-based story at Sparks on 1 February.

And my disgruntlement is why I didn’t feel like running. Perhaps now I have my protag will pitch up tonight and let me get some quality words down, to go with my quality miles.

The cake was awesome, by the way.

Janathon Day 6 – chocolate is my fuel of choice

Today’s blog is brought to you by Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Milk Chocolate Costa Rica Coffee, all 100 grams of it!

Yes, I eat therefore I run. It’s always been that way for me. Not necessarily running, but something aerobic. And I’ve never, ever, been on a diet.

When I was little I studied ballet (very, very, badly). As a teen it was swimming (until Jaws arrived at Sandown flea-pit: like many an Island-raised kid in the summer of ’76, I developed a phobia of the water that lasted right through the hottest summer on record) and in winter, school cross-country. I started yoga aged 12, when I gave up ballet, and have – pretty well – performed some asanas every day of my life since then. When I have a garden I spent most of my summer in it, and now I have an allotment, I spent most of my winter there, digging. I run, I walk the dog twice a day, I don’t drive when I can walk … does that make me sound like a sanctimonious health-freak? Probably. But I’m not.

I don’t know how people live without exercise. This blog is not called writing neuroses by accident. If I don’t get regular endorphin-inducing exercise I become miserable, faintly paranoid and deeply neurotic. The less exercise I get, the more narrow minded and unhappy I become. I don’t choose to run: I have to run if I want to be happy. If I get injured and can’t run, I have to do something else, exercise-wise, or sink into lethargy, despair and unhappiness. Five days is my limit – six days of inactivity begins my downward spiral.

On the other hand, I eat whatever I like, always have. My six foot one and a half inch tall OH and I eat the same amount. I’m five foot six and a size ten which is the size I’ve been since I was 12 years old. Since I was about 14, people (mainly women) have been telling me (somewhat sourly) that one day all the calories that I’ve consumed will ‘catch up with me’. Well I’m 48 and they haven’t so far, and as I generally only run 11 minute miles, I’m not exactly outpacing them, am I?

I eat chocolate every day. My passion is cherries in alcohol: whether it’s those cheapie ones you get in a quid shop, the Elizabeth Shaw cherry brandy liqueurs that tend to have crystallised into brandy sugar, or my top two: Montezuma’s kirsch chocolate cherries and Hotel Chocolat’s kirsch cherries. I will do anything for a packet of either of those (but I haven’t written the post about running, endorphins and orgasm yet, so you’ll have to take my word for it, for now). Denied top-quality cocoa-based products, I settle for Toblerone (or anything by Lindt) then the Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference range. If it comes to the crunch, then crunch is what I take: Crunchie from the Texaco garage on the corner!

Oh yes, I ran today. 4.26 k in the driving rain, with a blood test to punctuate the distance at the mid-point. It was absolutely bloody glorious – I loved every minute of it. I got home soaked to the skin, insanely happy, and starving. Two mugs of tea and one bar of chocolate later I am still insanely happy. Happy enough, in fact, to shove up a soaking-wet, grinning-like-a-maniac, post-run picture of myself just to prove that the calories still haven’t caught me …

Janathon Day 5 – the bad karma day

An old running friend rings me.

Her: I saw your blog about runners and masochism.

Me: Good. The point of writing is for somebody else to read it.

Silence

Her: Oh. Right … So … I liked it a lot.

Me, graciously: Thank you.

Her, apprehensively: But…

Me, frostily: But?

Her, even more apprehensively: Well, when you first mentioned sexual deviancy and runners you said you were going to write about runners, sexual deviancy, and chocolate.

Me: And your point is?

Her: You didn’t include the chocolate.

Me: Did you READ the post I wrote yesterday?

Her, now with quavering voice: Yes, of course I did, every word!

Me: And do you consider yourself to be somebody who knows me?

Her: Urm. Yes?

Me: Yes – question mark?

Her: Yes, no question mark. Yes, I know you.

Me: And what did I say that people who knew me would be thinking as they read it?

Her: Urm … that you weren’t a masochist?

Me: That’s right. So, given the theme of the post, what does that probably make me?

Her, obviously wondering if she should say what she’s thinking which is ‘a patronising bitch’: Urm …a sadist?

Me: Well done!

Her: I don’t get it.

Me: Think about it.

Her: Urm … oh, right. That’s nasty.

Me, smugly: Never said I wasn’t nasty.

Her: So are you going to write about chocolate?

Me: You really don’t get this sadism stuff do you?

Her, puts phone down.

Today’s run: 1.8k downhill in the stinging rain to the doctors’ surgery and 1.8k back in similar rain but up the godforsaken hill, so two runs really or a split run with added hanging around in the middle, stinking the GPs’ waiting room up. GP used to be a runner and is now a swimmer, so he didn’t mind, or was polite enough to say he didn’t.

Why run to the doctors’ surgery? Because OH’s van failed its MOT. He has my car, so I have no vehicle today and lots of words had to be banged together so that was my only chance to run. Disgruntled is not the word for my mood right now.

So I am going to the cinema to see a film – on the bus. Today has been a lousy running day – tomorrow I have to do the same run again but in the morning, for a phlebotomist’s appointment, and I think that is my bad karma (for being a cow on the phone) catching up with me. Therefore tomorrow’s blog will contain fulsome amounts of writing about chocolate, okay?

PS - look closer, some of those flowers are made of chocolate ...

Older, Colder, Slower, Tireder (or not as the case may be) Janathon Day 4

Today’s run is brought to you by:

• Solo Gamalat (Gamal Goma)
• Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Daft Punk)
• Weapon of Choice (Fatboy Slim)

I didn’t expect today’s run to be any fun at all, for the reasons in the title plus:

1. The piriformis syndrome (which, sallyshurdles, is a hollow, aching pain from the buttock down the outside of the thigh, sometimes to the knee [my version] sometimes to the ankle. Caused by overuse, or by sitting for too long – as I do both it’s not surprising that I developed piriformis syndrome last year)
2. It being Day 4 and me not having slept well
3. The run being my ‘default’ run: out of the door, past St Peter’s church, round by the greyhound track and the big Co-op, back up Nevill Avenue and home past the Texaco garage – not a thrilling prospect is it?

Even so, even so. Back to the postponed point about sexual deviancy – notably, masochism. There’s a line in my about-to-be-published book about allotments that says that digging becomes a worryingly addictive masochism. My editor asked me what I meant. One of the publicity team asked what I meant. My copy-editor asked what I meant … so I thought I’d explain here.

Let’s start by saying I am not a masochist. Those who know me, and have read this far, were already giggling like hyenas at the idea that I might have any acquaintance with the world of the submissive sufferer of pain and carefully inflicted humiliation. Even so, even so.

Runners are masochists. Correction – distance runners are masochists and sprinters are sadists. Those who choose to get up before it’s light, pull on unpleasantly cold clothing, grudgingly stretch tired and aching muscles (or not: the devout masochist will in fact ‘run off the pain’ by just pushing their body into action without giving it any form of preparation), and then force said tired and aching form into long, cold, dark, lonely, painful and sometimes miserable activity are surely the very definition of masochism. They make the pain, they take the pain, and they suck up the pain and come back for more.

On the other hand, sprinters are sadists. They put up with pain, for the sake of making those who lose races to them suck up humiliation and even more pain. Sprinters thrive on causing pain to others, and having to endure some pain themselves is acceptable only because they are (or at least they believe they are) causing excessive pain to other sprinters.

Digging, by the way, is much like distance running. It’s addictive because you dig a row and your back aches, your knuckles have begun to burn with pain, the arch of your foot, where it hits the fork or spade, is a small hollow ache that is going to become an intense agony by bedtime, and you’ve found seven broken beer bottles, a huge lump of concrete that may have given you a hernia, and something that looks suspiciously like the body part of a deceased human being. And yet the row you’ve dug looks satisfyingly tidy, so you decide to dig another. Just one more, before you pack it in for the day. And then you find the groove of digging and when you next look up (back screaming in pain, knuckles feeling like they’ve been brazed by an oxy-acetylene torch, and the arch of your foot throbbing as if you’ve trodden on a tetanus-ridden rusty nail) you’ve only got two rows to go. So you dig them too, don’t you?

That’s masochism. That’s what distance runners would just love to do, if it didn’t interfere with their training programme. And because I am an allotment-holder as well as a runner, I am a crap runner because I divide my pain between my addictions.

Even so, even so. 2.65 k today, no fit young men to smile at me (just the lovely old chap who used to run with his Cairn Terrier, but doesn’t seem to have the dog any more) instead a pavementy, unpretty, decidedly grey plod spent dodging smirking kids from the school, mums with buggies and miserable codgers with their shopping from the Co-op waiting for the bus) but still a good run. Actually, a great run.

Sometimes you suck it up and it turns out not to be pain after all, it turns out to be sheer pleasure.

Masochist fruit image courtesy of Malinki at Flickr

Janathon Day 3 – when the going gets tough …

Who am I kidding? It hasn’t even begun to be tough yet. Not physically anyway. Mentally – maybe.

I had a blog post all planned out in my head about running, sexual deviancy and chocolate (and I might still get round to writing that one, as it’s a good bundle of topics to spend pondering on a long run and most runners are interested in running and in chocolate, sexual deviancy perhaps not so much) but I woke up this morning feeling grumpy and with pain in my piriformis and the whole day spiralled downwards from there.

By lunchtime I was downright miserable and I knew I had to run, so it was over to the cheap psychological tricks department for a tried and tested cure for the Bank Holiday blues: upbeat music selections, a new hat and a poseur’s running route. Which explains why I was in Hove Park, listening to The Four Seasons (1963, Oh What a Night) and Shaggy and Rayvon (Summertime), wearing my old (as in purchased several years ago) but nearly new (as in virtually unworm) Pearl Izumi blue beanie because it’s the posiest thing I own, running-wise. I was also wearing a bright yellow jacket in case you were there too.

This time I didn’t bother with the Garmin as I know the distance (1.88 km) so I have no idea of the time in which I ran it, but it was fast. The pictures are from August 2009, as I forgot to take the camera. Today I looked just like that, but wearing more clothes and a much better hat.

• 1.88 k
• Time unknown (but swift)
• Route = Hove Park circular
• Poseurs passed = 0 (a pretty rare experience in Hove Park, I must have timed it right)
• Friendly women runners on the route = 3 (two on the slow side: possibly sticking to New Year’s Resolutions to run/lose weight, one very fast and with excellent gait)
• Westie puppies stroked = 1
• Moods changed = 1 (from bad to good)
• Fit young male runners who smiled at me = 1 (he smiled twice, each time we passed, so it wasn’t an accident)
• Piriformis stretches performed = 5.

Janathon Day 2 – with added hill

• 2.12 k
• time unknown (because I can’t be arsed)
• route – Waterhall

This is what the hill in Waterhall looks like. That’s Rebus the Cairn Terrier pretending he’s not ten years old, by the way. He’ll sleep for the rest of the day now, and probably for most of tomorrow too.

When I was running cross-country as a teenager, they used to say a foot in the country was a yard on the road: that sounds rather obscene, now I reflect on it.

I ran cross-country because I hated organised sport but had to do something. The training route went past Sandown train station (bacon butties) and the Railway pub (vodka and Tia Maria) and I could stand in the underpass and smoke and still get back with the final group. This may not have been the kind of incentive our PE teachers thought they were offering but they were gits and bitches so their preferences weighed little with me then and less now.

So a foot on Waterhall, this morning, was muddy and churned by the rugby and football teams who train on the lower pitches, and grass made with slippery with rain on the upper area which rises from the playing fields to the golf course. The sky was glorious and apart from a woman walking two black Labradors, we (me, OH and Rebus) had the upper stretch to ourselves. It was only 2.12 k, and a slow 2k at that, but now I’m off to the allotment to put in several hours of heavy labour, so I reckon each of those feet is easily going to be several yards of physical effort by the time today is over.

PS – I no longer drink or smoke.

PPS – I still tend to get back with the final group on any run, and it still doesn’t bother me.

Janathon Day 1 – runner interrupted

Let’s get the details out of the way:

• 5.25 k
• time unknown (to be explained below)
• route – Hove seafront from King Alfred past West Pier and back.

So … the first problem. I decided to borrow OH’s Garmin (not having one of my own) but as a result of a culinary incident involving hot fat (and the best pork crackling ever) on Xmas Day, I couldn’t wear it on my left wrist, meaning that I looked like Tommy Sheridan, disgraced Scottish socialist leader, who (in)famously wears his watch on the wrong wrist too.

Second problem. OH offered to run with me. Not a problem really, although he’s suddenly decided to train for the Brighton marathon, for which he’s long had a place but had sort of decided he couldn’t fit into his schedule. Now he can, apparently. And he’s a faster, stronger runner, so I spend a lot of the time we’re running together talking to his receding back, or pushing myself past my comfort zone.

Third problem. We stopped to get a drink at the volleyball café (okay, it’s not called the volleyball café, but it’s the one with the trophies opposite the volleyball court and I can’t remember the proper name) so I turned the timer off and forgot to turn it on again so I have no idea how long the run actually took.

Fourth problem. My imagination. I saw the shoe and thought Cinderella – given the time of year I would say that’s a natural and almost logical thought.

Then I saw this shoe, about a yard away, and I thought abduction. Which may not be natural or logical but it’s definitely how my mind works.

Slight aside, not my mind, Ren’s. Ren Holton is the name under which I write horror and science fiction.

Another slight aside. OH spent two decades patronising me because I can’t watch horror films. Like a lot of people, he assumed that my fear was based on the film itself, but it never was, it was based on what the film released into my head. Then, in 2006, somebody told me that women couldn’t write horror, or dystopias, or snuff. Well I’d never wanted to write snuff, but I don’t like being told I can’t do things, so I wrote a story called The Amphitheatre, published in Lullaby Hearse, and building on the concept of bio-retribution featured in Stephen K Donaldson’s Gap Sequence. OH read it. He had nightmares for weeks. WEEKS! Since then he has never taken the piss out of me – he understands that I have good reasons for refusing to let things into my psyche that mutate hideously to become night terrors.

Anyway, the shoes got me thinking. If I was going to abduct a young woman on New Year’s Eve, here’s how I would do it:

• Find out what she was planning to wear (favourite routes for this information: either following facebook conversations with her friends or – if I shared a house with her – going through her credit card slips)
• Buy a joke villain costume plus a T-shirt and beret that matched her dress. Also purchase a joke straitjacket, and a real ball gag. Rohypnol would be useful as a back up option.
• Wear costume, the camper the better, with false moustache etc, and coordinating items and be seen around town quite a lot in the hours before the abduction, ostentatiously trying to fit unlikely items into a swag bag (that already contained the gag and straitjacket). Make several swings into the young woman’s orbit, without actually making contact.
• After midnight, when people are much more likely to be on a downswing emotionally, approach girl in a location likely to be CCTV free (the seafront is quite good for this purpose) and try to doctor her drink. If that seemed unlikely to work I’d ask her directly to play out an abduction charade with me, explaining that I wanted to play a trick on a mate (best if you have mutual friends) and wanted her to be my ‘victim’. Given that alcohol lowers inhibitions, that I'd been acting like a prat all night, and that she would have got used to seeing me in my costume so her stranger-danger response would be well and truly switched off, I think I'd have a reasonable chance of persuading her. With any luck, she might actually let me put the gag on her, after which she'd have pretty well handed herself over for degradation and death. Put swag bag over her head, walk or carry girlie to location of white van. End of girl – beginning of nightmare.

The coordination between my outfit and hers would tend to imply, to any observer, that we had some kind of relationship, a collusion, so - given that it's Brighton and New Year and street theatre is perpetrated all year round here - I think I'd stand a good chance of actually carrying a kicking young woman past any potential onlookers without comment.

One of my first acts, even before shoving her drunken form into the straitjacket (and securing her wrists with a nice pair of real cuffs) would be to take off her heavy and potentially dangerous shoes because a kick from those babies would be totally demoralising, not to mention potentially disabling. Yeah, I’d leave them on the seafront because it could imply a Jaws scenario (drunk totty goes swimming) or that the young woman just took her shoes off and left them because they pinched her feet. In either case, as long as my DNA wasn’t on the footwear, it wouldn’t affect the police case as far as I can see.

And because all this was spinning through my mind, I forgot to restart the timer on the Garmin and that’s why I’m a writer and not a runner.


Later addendum: this may be what actually happened ....