Death by 10K

It's okay.  Don't panic.  I'm not really dead dead.  Just a little bit dying right now.  I ran 10K this morning for the third time in my life and I did not enjoy it.  I'm not sure I've ever really enjoyed it but today I found it ridiculously unpleasant.  I think I've realised that 10K is not something that you can just wake up one morning and run without being completely ready.

I did try to be ready, I really did.  Having not run properly for a while I did the Race for Life in July with some of the school mums and sitting around with two bottles of champagne in my belly afterwards I agreed to run a half marathon with them in November.  Easy, I thought to myself.  July to November is a nice long time and I put together a training plan.  I then went to France and drank every day and ate cheese for two weeks.  September came with the craziness of the beginning of term and I was struggling to fit in the running (or struggling to be arsed to do any running!)  Saturday morning runs are out due to Friday nights so that meant that it had to be one night after work.  I began running around Clarence Park after my Monday evening meeting finished at 5pm, building up by half a mile a week.  I've always liked Clarence Park - nice and flat.  This all went very well until about three weeks ago when I pulled a muscle in my calf at 4 miles and stopped.  Bum.  No worries thought I; I continued with personal training and boot camp and thought that the long-distance-running-adrenaline-fairy would carry me through today.

Just before this calf-pull incident; I drunkenly signed up my friend and personal trainer Elena to do this 10K today with me.  She panicked for about five minutes and then embraced it in true Dundjerovic style and set out to smash it for me in my target time of less than an hour.

I realised there was a problem when we started off the first kilometre at a canter when I was expecting a trot.  Jeebus.  Maybe this hour malarky wasn't doable after all.  I was trying to tell Dunders that I was about to die already, five minutes in but I couldn't manage to get the words out.  I tried all sorts of tactics: slow down, try and get stuck behind a fatty, pretend to trip over a dog; but she was taking her job very seriously and kept me going at what I had quickly realised was not at all my pace.

I had described the hill at 4K to Elena as basically the same as Mount Everest and she had told me in no uncertain terms that I was not walking up it.  About halfway up I was most definitely walking up it and no amount of cajoling, shouting and even pushing me seemed to change that.  People were beginning to stare at the obviously fitter less sweaty lady pushing the seriously angry looking more sweaty bird in the back to try and make her go faster.  'She's a bitch' I was telling everybody I could.  Nobody replied.  It is not the best hill for conversation really.

I started running again (having tried to turn around and go home a couple of times) and by the time we hit 5K I knew I would probably finish at least and didn't care how long it took. Elena was still trying to do her job, the job I had set her up for, but I was trying to pant to her that I didn't want her to do the job anymore I just wanted to wallow silently in my own sweaty misery.  She tried everything but I was decidedly grumpy.  She was laughing when I tried to stop running again at about 7K and was telling her to fuck off with one breath but then when somebody came out of their house to cheer us on I was sweetness and light itself with a smile and a wave.  Poor Elena.

I did try to convince her to run on and save herself.  She knows far too many fit PT people who will be looking up her race time after all but she is a good friend and stuck with me and my little trot until the bitter end.  Apparently we are doing it every year from now on.  I reckon I might just stick on some rollerskates next time and tie myself onto her waist.

I have already backed out of the half marathon and am hugely relieved I will not be flogging it around Clarence Park seven times tomorrow evening.  I am now drinking all of my Saturday night champagne and enjoying the simple pleasure of sitting on my sore bum... ;-)

Old Dear

I'm feeling my age today.  I don't think I have ever written that sentence or uttered those words before but I'm sure I will say them again...and again...and again...in the future!

I went into town last night with a bounty of beautiful twenty-something girls from my workplace.  I had a lovely time.  Apart from the twenty minute wait at the bar every time I wanted a drink; that was not okay.  I'm ashamed to say that I was thinking of my own lovely fridge full of champagne that never, ever makes me wait when I visit it.  I was chatting to a lady in the bar-scrum who asked me how old I was.  When I told her I was 39, one of my colleagues popped up from behind my back and screeched 'THIRTY NINE!  WOW!  You look AMAZING!'  Obviously, I'm always willing to be told loudly that I look amazing but what was with the emphasis on the 39?  I wasn't aware that it was possibly NOT to look okay at 39.  This is still on the correct side of 40 right?

I had a real laugh but when at 11.15pm everybody stopped sitting down and chatting and started bobbing about behind their chairs and muttering about going dancing, I decided my time had come to exit stage left.  I was relatively sober, (due to the ridiculous wait at the bar), and happily began to wave the kids off in the direction of somewhere noisier and more dancey,  At this point however, the maybe-a-little-bit-worse-for-wear birthday boy decided that his evening couldn't possibly continue without me in it so he sent the girls off dancing and we put the world to rights over a few double gins in a variety of pubs before I dumped him with the dancing queens and legged it into a cab about 12.30.  Home at a sensible time to see my husband; but the worrying part of this story is that I sat down with him and had a chat over a cup of decaffeinated tea and a pain au chocolat.  Could I get any more middle class and middle aged?!

Let's assume that was breakfast then, as I was back on form today with the first thing to pass my lips being champagne at midday.  That's more like it.  I met my Uni pal Clare in Hammersmith for my second viewing of 'Things I Know to be True'.  Clare always looks fabulous.  She works for the London College of Fashion and I swear she knows what the next fashion is before the designers have even begun to design it.  I remember Lyns and I howling with laughter over dinner with her about three years ago, when she referred to her (perfectly nice) trousers as 'tailored joggers'.  We thought it the most hilarious oxymoron until a couple of months later we found that they were everywhere. That girl knows.  So today she turns up in a pair of amazing blue culottes.  If I put culottes on I would look about 85, or that I was back in 1985, one of the two.  However, Clare rocked the look, beautifully. So beautifully in fact that the elderly (yet very stylish) lady on the table next to us came over and told her how fabulous she looked and how amazing her style was.  How kind. The sting in the tail was that immediately afterwards she asked to move tables as we were so noisy...  When Clare, Lyns and I are together, I immediately feel 21 again.  I was thinking on the train on the way home though that the lady that paid Clare a compliment would probably have been about our age now when the three of us first met at Uni... Scary stuff.

I'm looking forward to turning 40.  If only for the amount of lovely champagne I will be given.  I'm not looking forward to turning 50 however.  That seems ridiculously scary. Would I have coped with the thought of turning 40 a few months before my 30th birthday though?  There was a poignant line in the play today where the female protagonist tells her 63 year old husband that there is less in front of them than there is behind them but that doesn't mean that they should give up on living. Unsurprisingly, that didn't seem to cheer him very much...

I pray that I never lose my sense of fun.  There was a moment last night when I slightly lost my footing and my colleague gallantly threw himself to the ground to ensure that if I was face down in the street he was most definitely going to be face down with me to make me feel better about the situation.  I was laughing so hard at this that it took me much longer than it should have done to recover my footing and return to a vertical position.

Anyway, I've been out all day today and it is nearly ten o'clock so I reckon it is time for me to head to my bed with a cup of tea and a bourbon.  Or will I?  Maybe it is time to recreate the days of getting out of pyjamas and into gladrags at 10pm instead to head out out?

Maybe not.  Night night.  :-)