Gadgets and gizmos

Days to go                 53

Miles today                6.5

Miles this week         15.8

Miles last week         40

Miles 2011                 222.5

Other exercise          Are you joking?       

Before embarking on a limited tour of the gadgets and gizmos available to runners, I’d like to briefly bewail the rather wet weather that SG and I enjoyed / endured on Saturday. It tipped it down, and despite SG’s valiantly optimistic observations, noting the diminishing ferocity of the precipitation*, we got soaked through.

* These were, of course, her exact words. Neither of us complained that it was piddling down.

Not only that, we got muddy. Part of our 18-mile circuit followed the lovely A---- Woulds Trail, a haven of quiet after running along the roadside. Unfortunately, while roads generally have gutters and drains, the Trail does not. Instead, it has Doctor Foster-esque puddles and waist-deep mud baths. Think the inestimable Fran Cotton crossed with the swamp beast and you are approaching just how muddy we were.

Still, as SG cheerfully pointed out, it could be wet and windy on 17 April – fantastic...

Anyway, runners’ gadgets and gizmos.

Like all pastimes and pursuits, running could cost a small – or, indeed, a rather large – fortune, if you are so inclined: armbands, calf guards, Camelbaks, clothing and shoes, energy bars and drinks, Garmins, head torches (more below), heart-rate straps, specialist skincare products, sunglasses, supports, waist packs...

At this point, let me be frank and point out that I’m not really a gadget girl. I don’t actually own half of the techie things you can buy armband holders for.

I live in a house where analogue is king. We are surrounded by vinyl – remember records? They were the big, (generally) black precursors to the smaller, shinier silver compact disc.

iPod? iPhone? iPad? Forget it. My mobile is a good five years old and just makes calls and sends messages. It doesn’t do apps or even take pictures. I don’t own a camera or even a computer (I tap away at this blog during my lunch breaks). I don’t really do iStuff – I do books, generally paperbacks.

Even so, since taking up running, I’ve received various nicks and knacks to help me along my way: an armband light, an armband mobile phone holder, books (hurrah!), a pedometer... I’ve not really got on with any of them. The armbands rub my upper arms raw and the pedometer dozes off part-way through a circuit so that a six miler measures more like two – not good for the confidence: that kind of distance should not take almost an hour.

SG has a fabulously fun toy. We do most of our running in the evenings after work, generally when it is bitter and gloomy, and tend to run on mole-vision. We have almost come a cropper in a tangle of dog, dog-lead and dog-walker on more than one very embarrassing occasion. So, SG’s head torch is a real boon. It straps most fetchingly around her hat and beams a gentle, bobbing will o’ the wisp for us to pursue endlessly through the cold and dark.

Last Christmas, my boyfriend – in this instance, Clever Man (or aptly, CM for short) – gave me a fantastic gift. As a general rule, I’m not one to applaud or promote corporate business, nor slavishly follow brands, but for this toy I am prepared to make an exception. It’s gr-r-reat™!

The Nike+ SportsBand.

It measures how far I’ve run, the time it took, average minutes per mile, and how many calories I burned in the process. It also tallies my weekly runs and gives me the grand total of miles since our first outing together back in January. Thankfully, given Saturday’s adventure, it’s also water-resistant.

After each run, I plug the USB into the computer and watch my miles-run-to-date total trot up a little bit more. It’s highly satisfying and is certainly a bit of a motivator. According to my homepage I’m a green belt runner – only another gazillion until I ascend to the celestial heights of black belt.

When proudly viewing the graph plotting “all runs”, my virtual coach perks up with helpful and supportive observations like:

“You run most on Monday. Add more days to the mix with a training programme.”

 “You run 4 times a week on average. Make it 5 with a monthly goal.”

“0 Medals” and “0 Trophies”

Pah – everyone’s a critic!

Please visit my fundraising page at

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/PaulaHamill

The un-benefits of exercise

Days to go                57

Miles today               0

Miles this week       22 (with 18.5 planned for tomorrow)

Miles 2011                188.8

Other exercise         0 – if you don’t count enjoying a decadent latte

We all know the benefits of regular exercise. Everyone, from the very young to the elderly, is encouraged to get busy with the exercise. It can help to combat a multitude of terrible things including back pain, heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, non-insulin-dependent diabetes, obesity, and osteoporosis. It can also build and maintain healthy bones, joints and muscles, while improving your mood, and helping to reduce depression and stress.

Fantastic stuff, and I’m all in favour of playing a team sport, sweating in a gym, practising yoga, going for a stroll in the fresh air, and even Wii-ing in your lounge, if you really must. There is certainly a whole heap of evidence to suggest the positive impact of exercise on health – and it can really help with a variety of social skills too: team work, co-operation, communication, and so on.

However, you don’t hear so much about the un-benefits of exercise, do you? And let me tell you, I’ve discovered several over the past few weeks since doing this running marlarky – what feels like – full-time. Training for a marathon is punishing.

I’m cream-crackered all the time. All I want to do is sleep. That is, when I’m not trying to eat my own body weight in cake because I’m ravenous. On second thoughts, not sure that’s an un-benefit. I do like cake – a lot. Moving on.

I have a lovely array of blackened toe-nails: an aurora borealis swirling through green, yellow and blue on their way back – I’m hoping – to my natural skin tone. What’s more, I’m having to cut them so short my little piggies are all heading off to market to buy vests and scarves to keep warm.

I’ve blisters on my feet the size, colour and consistency of pizza – and we’re talking family-sized servings here, not your four-times-smaller-than-the-box-it-came-in freezer bargain.

Moving up my leg, I have shins splints that rattle like broken crockery. And, oh, gosh – hour-long muscle spasms in my calves and thighs which make walking up and down stairs a sight to behold. Gone are the days of skipping up and down like a gazelle – think Julie Walters in Two Soups.  

There are friction burns on all my tender parts. No matter how much fabric conditioner I use in my wash, or how much Vaseline I smother over my limbs, or even how many metres of Micro-pore I swathe myself in, I still look like I’ve taken a sheet of coarse sandpaper to myself.

There is also the question of my lost dignity and, indeed, last vestiges of humanity. At about mile 15, I become a snorting, dribbling, staggering creature with bad hair, and scarlet, gurning visage. And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

So, you may ask yourself, why, in the name of all things sane, am I doing this?

One, I recently had a full MOT at a health fair and passed with flying colours – not bad for an ex-smoker.

Which leads me on to, two: I can – and so many people can’t. As SG says, when it really starts to hurt: “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Three, I love it.

Four, it’s not yet 12 months since my almost-brother-in-law had life-saving, life-changing heart surgery – and he now cycles at least 100 miles a week.

‘Nuff said.

Please visit my fundraising page at

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/PaulaHamill

OMG – I’m running the London Marathon

It’s just shy of a fortnight since Heart Research UK agreed to take a chance on me and welcomed me onto their London Marathon Team.

The fundraising is going brilliantly – a huge thank you to everyone who is supporting me – and I’m staggering reasonably well towards the miles on legs target. I’m up to 40 a week, completing my longest run to date on Saturday: 18.5 really-blooming-hard solo miles. Same again this week, and then I’ll hike it up the week after.

Just to be clear, in case anyone is thinking that I’m some kind of running wunderkind, I haven’t started from scratch.

Previously, on Little Miss Mileage...

I gave up smoking, almost four years ago, and began running in a regular but, truth be told, desultory fashion in an effort to combat the post-smoking weight gain. I was amazed to discover that I actually rather enjoyed it. So, I ran as part of a marathon relay team – we ran about six miles each – and completed a six mile Race for Life. I was hooked.

Then, when contemplating the big four-oh at the end of 2009, I drew up a little list of things I wanted to achieve at the grand old age of 40. Running a half-marathon seemed like a really good idea. I know, I know. What was I thinking? So, I trained and, in the end, actually ran three – all around the two hour mark.

Then, in Spring 2010, I was lucky enough to meet – let’s call her SG (she knows why) – my running buddy of almost a year now. After quite a long injury-break, she was keen to get back into running and wanted someone to cajole / encourage / bully her into training for the London Marathon 2011. She is running for the mental health charity, Mind.

Having worked hard with her, running a marathon seemed like a fantastic goal for me in 2011. I know, I know. What was I thinking? So, when a place running for Heart Research UK came up, I jumped at the chance.

The ad I responded to in my local freebie newspaper.

Anyway, because this is more than likely a once-in-a-lifetime thing – who am I kidding, I’ll be surprised if my body ever agrees to run again after 17 April – I thought I’d keep a bit of a record of my knee-crunchingly foot-sore progress over the next couple of months and share it with you online.

Please visit my fundraising page at

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/PaulaHamill