Running up that hill

I'm lucky enough to live somewhere beautiful.
I'm unfortunate enough to be intrinsically lazy. I love walking, but faced with the tough choice of another chocolate HobNob or getting a bit puffed out on a big hill, I'll go for the instant gratification and non-sweaty option.

This has presented me with a bit of a problem. I'm now seriously unfit, having done just one walk in 2011. So I decided to set myself a little challenged for 2012 - Walk 200 miles during the course of the year.

Sounds easy, right? Yeah - I've only got to do 3.8 miles per week. I have set myself some rules - strolling to the shop for a cappuccino doesn't count; it has to be a walk for the sake of a walk. Distances of under a mile don't count either.

3.8 miles a week. Easy. Yeah. Except I work, so in the the winter, weekdays are out. Still, 3.8 miles every weekend - can't be that hard, can it? Can't miss a weekend though, or I'll need to do 7.6 miles the next week. And I live in Cumbria - it only has one weather setting, and that's why we have bloody big lakes.

So I decided to get started promptly. 3.5 miles over Arnside Knott today. Considering it has rained every day for at least a fortnight, the mud factor was pretty high. So was the out-of-breath-possibly-having-a-heart-attack factor going up.

I'm pathetic. And I have a lot of walking to do. Did I mention I want to lose half a stone too? I had to deny myself chocolate this evening.

If you hear of a murderous rampage in South Cumbria over the next couple of weeks, it'll be me. Assuming I'm able to get out of the chair.

(CD's galore for Christmas! Currently listening to Tori Amos' "Night Of Hunters". Moodyaliciousness!)

Comments

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog