Category: running

Man Multiplied by Machine

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

In the first of a mini-series about cycling, theshit50s talks bikes and better mental health

Original images: Richard Reid and Clker Free Vector Images/Pixabay

RIDING MY BIKE is keeping me sane at the moment.

We’ve been going out several times a week lately – my bike and I. Usually early in the morning, before the winds get up, and in gaps between the rain showers that are making this second lockdown Spring tooth-grindingly disappointing.

Often, when we start off, I’m not feeling very strong – either mentally, or physically.

I’ll be anxious, or hungover, or both. But I go, anyway, because I know that 30 or 40 kilometres of riding will reset me in a way that a night’s sleep often can’t. I’ve learned that simply focusing on the road, and climbing a few stiff-ish hills, will settle me down enough to handle the day.

What also helps is that the bike feels kind. Cycling is much more forgiving exercise than running, which was always my go-to anxiety cure until recently. 

But, now I’m struggling with injury and my overall fitness, running doesn’t flow for me like it used to.

The broadcaster Max Rushden wrote a column about jogging recently that described exactly how jerky and laboured my own running style has become: “less fluid movement, more a set of individual competed actions. Land. Stop. Lift leg. Stop. Repeat.”

But I don’t have this problem when I’m cycling: instead of having to fight my body when I run, the bike co-operates with me.

When I’m not strong, the efficiency of my bike is sweet relief”

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Hyperactive

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 4 Comments

I think I’m lazy and useless – but my Fitbit says I’m not

I’VE BEEN STRUGGLING to like myself of late.

The pandemic is putting its tightest-ever squeeze on my mental health right now, even though most of the newspaper talk is about the good times supposedly just around the corner.

My current wobble is because the world has slowed down so much, particularly in the economic sphere.

In hindsight, March 2020 probably wasn’t the ideal time to launch a freelance career in the UK and – though I muddled along for the first six months – work seems to have ground to a halt recently.

But I just don’t know where the blame lies: is it the pandemic, or is it me?

This uncertainty, and the loss of role and income, are all difficult for me to cope with. I find myself snapping more, fretting more, and telling myself what a failure I am more.

I say to myself that I’m floundering because I’m lazy and useless, and then my self-flagellation spills out into other areas of my life.

Suddenly, I’m not happy with the way I look, or behave. Or the way I eat and drink, and skimp on exercise.  

But then I stumbled upon the truth – on my Fitbit, of all places.

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My Sobriety Mini-Break

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 2 Comments

Just eight days of not drinking reset my life and thinking

I WAS GOING TO WRITE about having a month off alcohol but, in the end, I only managed eight days.

Eight days! Most of us have had longer holidays than that, so it wasn’t exactly a life-altering change, was it?

Perhaps I’ll call it a holiday from drinking, instead? A sobriety mini-break? 

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Working (out) for The Man

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

Why should we exercise? Because we want to, or because we’re told to?

WHEN I SET OFF on my last run, I got an instant reminder of why I exercise.

I’d been feeling stressed but, once I’d gone a hundred metres, I just couldn’t hold the tensions in any more.

The work my arms and legs were doing forced my lungs to take in deep, long, breaths – instead of the jittery little swallows of air I’d been subsisting on all day.

Once I gave in, and stopped fighting to control my breathing, I felt my worries float away.

I felt free – but am I, really?

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This is it!

~ Mr Shit50s ~ Leave a comment

From feeling like a Baked Alaska to touching crisp, sun-warmed towels, this is the time of year I love most

SNOW STOPPED PLAY in our supposed summer game here on Monday. But, overall, the signs are that Spring is getting 2021 in a headlock at last.

Yesterday, I was out running in warm sunshine, wearing my shorts – alternately horrifying and dazzling passers-by as bright light bounced back off my veiny old white legs.*

Afterwards, I walked up to our allotment and watered for the first time this year.

My wife’s been working on the plot for months as an escape from lockdown, and it’s looking in particularly fine fettle as a result.

We look like getting a bumper crop of strawberries, while the patches containing onions, garlic and raspberries are all weeded, composted and ready to grow. Purple Sprouting Broccoli is already… um, sprouting. Wildly.

At home, Her Indoors is already potting and hardening off** the next tranche of plants – summery crops, ready to go into the ground when it warms up a bit more. Greedily, I gaze at these infant leeks, tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and artichokes, and their promise of eagerly-anticipated High Summer.

Gardening is a show of faith that there will be something to look forward to”

One of the great psychological benefits of gardening, of growing things, is that it’s a kind of pact with the future. What I mean is, planning a garden – leaving stuff in the ground, and trusting it to grow – is a show of faith that there will be something to look forward to further down the line, which in turn makes you want to be there to see and taste it.

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Kudos to the Couch To 5k Brigade!

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 3 Comments

Struggling for fitness, I’m appreciating – not patronising – newbie runners

New runners givin’ it bifters. Picture: anthonynolan.org

AS A NON-CLUB RUNNER who trains mainly alone, I’ve never felt we runners were that friendly towards one other.

Maybe it’s just a London thing, and people are different elsewhere…

But city pavement-bashers find it hard to break the habit of always blanking strangers and treating them with suspicion – even when we’re dressed in the same running gear, and united in suffering.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s the suffering that does it? Perhaps we’re not being bad mannered intentionally, it’s just that we’re all in our own little worlds of pain, which even other runners don’t really come into.

A while ago, I read an article that compared runners to a kind of secular priesthood – think the shared sense of vocation and dedication; the urge towards purity and transcendence, even the uniform.

But the piece struck one bum note when it described how runners supposedly greet each other as they pass, by raising an arm like a priest in benediction, and I thought: “I’ve never seen that happen.”

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Mental Health? Hardest Game In The World

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 5 Comments

Here’s a quick rant about the sheer drudgery of staying on an even keel

Image: Schäferle/Pixabay

I SOMETIMES WISH that I had a quid – or even a penny – for every hour I’ve spent working on my bloody mental health.

I feel like the Fast Show character – “Mental ’ealth? 30 years, man and boy, I done it! Hardest Game in The World, that is!” – when I think of all the time I’ve lost to shoring up my mood.

I’m thinking about all the runs and rides I made myself do, so I’d feel better…. the hours and days reading self-help books and articles…. the journaling and unsent letters to people who’d hurt me…. the years and years in therapy.

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Scared of Running? It’s Just Your Inner Caveperson Talking

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 3 Comments

Understanding why I get stressed before a workout has helped make running fun again…

Original images: Artur Luczka and Ryan McGuire/Pixabay

WHEN I WERE a teenager, Space Invaders machines were the latest thing, jazz-funk bands like Linx and Shakatak were riding high in the charts*, and I used to go to swimming club every week.

I bloody hated swimming club.  

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Thighs Don’t Lie

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 2 Comments

My knees and hips are also furious about my new exercise regime

OF COURSE I’m on a health kick at the moment.

It’s January, season of new starts. And anyway, what else is there to do these days if you’re not a sainted Key Worker?

From what I can work out, everybody else’s motivation and productivity seem to have fallen off a cliff while we mooch around at home, waiting for our distant vaccinations and the post-Covid New Dawn.

Despite this (and as if there wasn’t enough for us to be down about already) many of us still feel we should be achieving something with all this lockdown downtime.

So I’ve decided to try and turn back the clock, yet again, to when I was thin and thirty-ish.

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How To Flip A Heavy Day Like A Judo Throw

~ Mr Shit50s ~ 1 Comment

Surprisingly, happiness lies in a blast of adverse weather

Original image: giografiche/Pixabay

TODAY WAS THE SORT of January day we all dread – cold and grey, with north winds driving tiny needles of sleety rain hard into your face.

We don’t have the world’s harshest weather here in the north temperate zone but – trust me – today was horrible enough.

When you threw in the post-Christmas comedown, worrying rates of Covid infections, and the Government announcing another six-weeks of lockdown, it added up to the perfect excuse for just sitting around and feeling fed up.

Which is precisely why I went outside…

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