Skip to main content

Run, Fatboy, Run! (Or walk...don’t overdo it.)

Image
By

You know how you keep saying you’ll go out for a walk, and then don’t? Then think it might be a bit tiring, so don’t? Then eat a cake (or three), then don’t? Then just don’t? Guilty as charged.

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. Mind you, I do get quite excited about biscuits, so sometimes it’s hard to spot the difference.

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 Bakehouse in Arnside 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 (allegedly, although I defy anyone to prove what it is I actually do), so in 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 those big lakes.

So I decided to get started promptly. Every weekend this year I’ve done 3.5 miles over Arnside Knott. I’m lucky to be alive. The mud factor was pretty high the first weekend (so was the out-of-breath-possibly-having-a-heart-attack factor going up), and since then I’ve been frozen, hit in the face by a branch in a gale, seen rain going sideways (that stings, by the way) and contended with loads of dogs. Oh, and small children making it look easy.

I’ve found my trusty Android phone’s mp3 player invaluable, although trying to get up a steep thing whilst walking in time to Queen’s “Staying Power” was nearly the last thing I ever did. Actually, so poorly was the album it came from, it was nearly the last thing Queen ever did too.

I'm pathetic. And I have a lot more 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.


This blog post appeared earlier this week as an entry in the North West Evening Mail's "Big Blogger" competition. Do me a favour - click on this link to view it on their website, please? That way, I register a hit, and stand a chance of getting through to the main competition. I bloody love you, I do!

(Fabulousness via the headphones tonight - the 2011 remaster of Queen's "Jazz" album. Mmmmmm. Rocktastic.)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shouting in the social media mirror

By
It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...
Post a Comment
Read more