I didn’t mention to you all later, but my run today was amazing. I normally run every day on a rather standard 6 mile route that takes me along the Birmingham canal network in from where I live, toward the centre of the town and then I stop, quietly die for about 20 seconds, and then turn around and go again! What joy.
And I know people could say that my little break half way through is cheating, but I don’t care; I like it and it’s just training and image-boosting running anyway. It’s not like I’m training for anything in particular!

So. Today was a good run, partly because it was hot. Normally a run that’s hot and dry is torture because you dry out and you can’t drink anything because that’d give a stitch. Hot air carries less oxygen so you have to breath in more air when it’s hot just to get the same effect as a breath of cold air. This is partly why running at high altitudes helps runners because when the body has adjusted to the lower level of oxygen they come back to sea level and awe the world with their speed.

So it was hot today because it was (strangely for a British summer) actually hot anyway, and I ran earlier than I normally do. I normally run from around 8 o’clock so that the day has cooled a bit and yet it’s still not pitch dark outside. It was good that the weather was hot because it made me think about what I could do to not stop running. There are so many times on my daily run that I could just go ‘arrrgh fuuuuuck’ and stop to actually breathe instead of panting my way along looking like I’m trying to stretch my torso out and mostly the reason I want to stop is because I’m so darn hot and so breathless. It’s not normally my legs being exhausted, but just that I’m unable to keep going. Today, I remembered how on the really long runs they tend to have overhead showers and so forth that spray you down. Then I rememebered that the professional runners never go in them; they make your feet wet – why would you ever want that on a marathon?

It makes you look like a goon, but I carry a bottle of water with me ever time I run. I get stitches so easily that I hardly ever drink from the bottle and if I do it’s normally just to barely wet my mouth; I’d cramp up and have to stop which is really not the point. Today I thought I’d just pour some of my water on my head instead, and it was amazing. I’m so dumb to have never done that before. I’ve been running for about 4 years properly, doing cross-country, doing 1500m athletics and doing long distance training and yet I’ve never done this. I’ve never tried.
It’s amazing. I’ve been trying to get myself back in shape after not really doing a whole load of running over the past year; not really having a great route or whatever crummy excuse, I just haven’t got around to it more than about twice a week. I go to the gym more but that’s not the same. So when I’m in form-ish I get about 45 minutes for my 6 mile/10 kilometer run. Today, I took FOUR minutes off that. I don’t know how that happened, but I ran 41 minutes today, which kind of blew me away as I realised I’d get a time near that as I was about 10 minutes from the end.

I don’t carry a watch with me because I find that if I’m not doing well it’s just distracting and demoralizing. If I’m running well consistently then it’s a great thing and you can work out tiny little improvements in your run continually, especially if you know a route really well and know how long you should take between particular points. I tend to know I should take a particular time up to each artificially created waymarker that I measure. I tend to make them up at good time points like 4 minutes thirty seconds, 12 minutes, 22 minutes and so forth rather than make a big obstacle the marker and then have to rememeber an arbitrary time. Instead I have to look up at the massive University clock tower that is near where I run along, meaning I can get a vague marker of how well I’ve been doing. Today, when I normally have 10 minutes left out of my 45 minutes, I only had 5 minutes left. w00t!

If I keep running at that speed, I’ll get 1:36 in the half-marathon which is just just just over my ideal time that I’m running for. I want to get 1:35 or less, so I’ll have to do rather well from now on. On a marathon, I’d get 3:26!
Marathon and split times calculator

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