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.
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