One year on

Today is the anniversary of my first venture into running. It lasted about 30 seconds.

I can remember clearly the days leading up to it. I was about halfway through my first attempt at stopping smoking and couldn’t sit still for five minutes so needed to find something to keep me busy and to burn the excess energy so I said to Kate, I might go and buy some trainers and take up jogging. She said you? Yeah, right. You don’t even believe in leaving the house in the daytime and you get taxis everywhere. But the next day I went to the shopping centre, braced myself and ventured into the scary sports shops that I thought were only for chavs, sporty people and, um, more chavs. I got myself a cheap pair of tracksuit bottoms and a hooded top and looked for a pair of trainers but couldn’t see any I liked (i.e. they had none in purple and I thought that only chavs wore trainers anyway) so I got a cheapy pair for ten English pounds in the cheapy shoe shop. I went home with my purchases and pledged that the next day I would wear my new strange clothes and go running.

And venture outside I did. On 18 December 2005 I got up and thought to myself, I know, I’ll do a few laps of the park. So I put on my new strange clothes and went to the park and started running. After half a lap of the park – point two of a mile – I stopped, gasping for air. I thought, fuck, I thought I could do better than that, I was really good at running at school. I attempted the second half of the park, but stopped after about three yards, so thought, sod it, it’s cold and this is no fun, I’m going home.

I couldn’t walk for three days after that and thought shit, I’m not going to be able to jump up and down at the Cardiacs’ gig on my birthday but Kate said, I’m sure you’ll be better by then and I was. I didn’t attempt to run again for a few weeks though. And started smoking again in the meantime on Christmas Day, but packed them in again on 3 January 2006 which is where my running story started again…