Scoped out the route

Half marathon, here I come.

Two hours running on Monday, photo shoot in the paper soon?

Friday walked the route (have a bad cold), four hours and imagined what it would be like without traffic.

Today running for an hour.

Marathon 12th September 2010

The marathon (well my first half marathon for fifteen years!) is on 12th September.

The New Balance team, including me, met for a photograph at the embankment on Monday 2nd at 6pm.

Now there’s no going back.

Today I am speccing the route , full of cold, but it should be interesting.

(since I last wrote I finished my first ‘book’, saw my daughter married and am looking forward to lots of useful and interesting opportunities).

Free at last…

I’m writing my first graphic novel. Spent this morning doing a story board. Lots of hard work ahead. Did the first draft of most of the pages, sketches of swans, people, hands, movement.  Very rough but there are some soft lines that I like….’that I’m liking!’

The run down the bus plug was slow, wearing my MBTs, though today I’d try to do seven laps of the field but would allow myself some grace, with a head over heels at the end if I couldn’t be bothered to do the seven.

The sun is shining and there are a couple of teenage girls doing cartwheels and taking photos of each other as they spin. Always wanted to learn how to do a cartwheel…instead I’ll compromise (!) this afternoon and go for a swim. As I run around the playing field I mull over all kinds of things, tried to think about what I really meant when I was thinking about fragility.

The thought passed in and out of my mind as I ran, began to think about the rest of the day. I must have been really absorbed as Will (my partner), called ‘Hello’ as he walked back from Tesco and said I was completely oblivious!

Sunday Running 50 Minutes

Today is Sunday, sun is shining and I’m running down the bus plug.

My rhythm is a kind of mantra: ‘I am running, I am running, I am running, I am running.’

I want to clear my mind of everything, just run. Although this works for a little while, thoughts cross my mind. Yesterday, had taken the camera to photograph swans at Trent Bridge for a story I’m writing.

The market square had been full of people, the farmer’s market, a drumming group, CND, chiming, ‘Don’t vote for any of them!’.

I bought some nice veg and some dry-cured ham, realised I’d been a bit side tracked, so thought I’d really enjoy the moment and sat down with a coffee.

Immediately, the woman next to me started talking, about how she had so many bags, that she always worried about opportunistic thieves, how she had worked for the police service for many years, that she had been divorced twice, that she had started temping and had left her last temp job in the NHS, after having got fed up with an awful manager but that since then, her work had dried up.

She didn’t mind, she was having a rest from work, she had done her bit, she was proud of her daughter who had a first class honours degree but she couldn’t understand why people were so self absorbed, why young people were so weak and demanding: she mentioned a female relative who had been anorectic and bulimic. She said the relative was in her thirties now, recovered, in a relationship, pregnant but she still worried about being overweight. She was going to tell her, when the relative did her nails tomorrow, if she went on about being overweight and pregnant to ‘stop being so self absorbed’.

Blimey, I thought. I had to say that maybe some people are fragile, that you can’t always see the reasons why and she snorted,

Puh!

I couldn’t really get into a conversationally responsive stride, as the daughter she was so proud of, with the first class forensics degree, came out of Debenhams and paraded the bikini she’d felt she had to try on before buying.

I gave up. Smiled at both of them and they went on their way.

They seemed a strange, angry pair of consumers. Do we all look like that to each other now?

As I ran, Sunday, down the bus plug and on and around the playing field, a bus passed with a picture of Whitney Housten on the side. I thought about again about ‘fragility’: her recent press and the reported screeching instead of singing at her concerts.

How many people could see Whitney as a successful survivor on this tour, even though, for now, she can’t perform. I thought about Jimmy Hendrix, Gill Scott Heron, people who communicated the fragility and hope of creativity as well as amazing music.

Perhaps what I realised is that fragility is really tentativeness, that it doesn’t always have to be this way?

Why I Am Running

Today I ran for twenty minutes and walked for fifteen. The sun was shining and I ran down the bus plug and then onto the field.  My plan was to run for an hour but then I thought I’d just like to walk and really enjoy the weather, say hallo to people and think about running later today.

I am running for lots of reasons. The main reason is to enjoy it and to respect my body.

I  hate sitting in an office without activity. For the past ten years, except for working to develop the Local News, doing the art course at De Montfort and helping set up the Oxfam Book and Music Shop in Bridgford, running around for my mum and my sister, which were quite physical, I have done work which involves sitting and making records of varying kinds.

That wouldn’t matter if everyone went out for a run or played basketball or table tennis at lunchtime or after work but most of the people I’ve worked with are sedentary. Although my partner walks miles over Edale,  it’s the moors that attract him and I think they’re bleak!!! I love to walk  through the colours of the countryside, fields, woods, by brooks and streams, even country roads.  To me, walking through inhabited greenery, over hills and dales, looking at the patterns of housing, roads, rivers, streams and woods makes sense. I am sometimes in the mood for moors but not often enough to be Will’s walking mate.

Running lets me think about how I can work better, use more of my experience, knowledge and ability, find out what I can do. It’s about thinking about how I started my working life, thinking that I knew nothing but also had the right to learn in my own way and in my own time and assess things from my own perspective.  I’ve always thought that was important for everyone: to find out and understand what they know and use that knowledge uniquely.

I’m running to regain my sense of proportion and humour.

I’m running because I like writing afterwards.

One and a Half hours…

A slow run today but kept moving for one and a half hours. Bit worried earlier in the week as I twisted my ankle in a pair of high heels walking back from work!

Seem to have quite bendy ankle joints though which in this case, saved me.

Felt a little twinge but am now feeling fitter and more able to think about running the half marathon. Started the cod liver oil and malt, giving up fresh coffee.

Early nights  seem to be increasingly attractive, our bed, especially last thing at night and first thing in the morning, is extremely comfortable…when you really start to work physically (today I dug and weeded and gardened), life is simple: work hard, eat and drink good things, enjoy your life and sleep.

What could be better?

11 minute Miles

mmmm the run was windy and uphill and fun but slow. Thought about what it would feel like to really run, really feel my feet.

At the moment, when I run it’s my mind that’s urging me on, the body is being forced into a rhythm by the will to do it.

My feet are being pulled along by me wanting to keep moving, I think.

So as I get better at running, more practised, more proficient, less self conscious, I think that I’ll start to feel more that my body is running with my mind.  At the moment, if I could visualise my mind/body it would be a rather large head and a weedy body.

There’s hope though. I’m going to start swimming and eating body building food.

Forty Minutes

Today is the first time I ran for forty minutes, have kept my body moving for that length of time for years.

It wasn’t hard, the pace was very slow and I was listening to the radio as I jogged.

Good stuff . Nothing profound today except that I ate too much hand crafted Chocolate Utopian Easter egg yesterday.

Half an Hour….

Easier running today, easier to get into the rhythm, feel more comfortable. Pace very slow at first along the bus plug, aware that I could probably run a marathon, if I get the training right.

At the moment, though, it’s just to do a half. The most important thing, enjoying the freedom of running and realising that it’s about not being distracted.

I’m infamous for distraction, either creating it or suffering from it. I thought about the route for the half marathon, as I remember it.

Wonder if it’s changed much. Remember how tired I was both times I did it at the same point. Nine miles. And really, nine miles isn’t much, if you do it in your own time, find ways of occupying your thinking.

The thing I’ll be trying to change is my mind set. I am ambivalent about running, know that I know nothing but know also, that to do it you have to believe that you’ve alreadydone it, but that belief is both negative and positive.

An open mind.  That’s what I need. Be able to experience as an agent, rather than a passive spectator. Wonder if sitting in an office and sitting in front of the TV, whether legs crossed on the floor or on the settee, really does change the way you see the world?

Most people love the passivity of our consumer life. It’s comfortable. One thing I really know I miss is the lovely level of action and activity that I felt I had that I didn’t really have to ‘plan, structure and organise’.

Still feel that there’s a level of spontaneity that we all need that creates a dynamic in us that makes it irrelevant what we do, it just makes sense, harmony and balance.

So in a way I’m beginning to realise how far away I still am from being ‘an active’ person. Though half an hour at a running pace is good and was enjoyable.

Round the Crescent

It’s 7.15 pm and I’m running down the bus plug.

Traffic sounds gradually disappearing as I move into the greener more wildlife echoes of the car-free zone.

As I run I am thinking.

Eddie Izzard, Picasso, conjuring up creative spirits and wondering if the MBTs I’m running in are right for my old lady feet.

Think poise, remember balance, posture. Wondering as I run: about Julia’s wedding, whether I’ll ever be able to communicate the way I want to.

I run along the bus plug and notice a left turn off onto a crescent of houses, not unlike where I grew up.  There’s that reassuring sense of what a council house meant before they were all sold off. They are all owner occupied now and, from the outside, have that same suburban stability, you can’t see greed, they look innocuously modest.

Running around here makes me think how easy it is to displace whole groups of people and it’s just not noticeable. Where did all the renters who wouldn’t, or couldn’t buy their council houses go?

Why do I care?

Running back along the bus plug seems easy.  I’ve forgotten that I’m running. I pass a man in his mid twenties perhaps who smiles and waves, two very fit women in their early twenties, in track suits who are doing a serious warm up walk and two more women, again in their mid twenties who smile but look me up and down in the way that a neighbour described the ‘look fit trendies’ who run wearing complete makeup and the season’s must have gear, always size your status before they speak.

Ah! Jealousy?

Typologies.  The runner is never invisible.

Not yet in the zone Paula. Ah! that’s where I want to be. I remember it well but it was a long time ago. Wonder if I’ll really improve?