Category: Janathon

I woke up feeling slightly achy after doing body pump yesterday but nowhere near as achy as I was expecting. Shaun said this is because I wore my Trion:Z. He’ll be reading his horoscopes next.

I wasn’t really sure about running on achy legs but thought I’d probably be ok and I had promised myself that I would run 3 miles today even if ‘run’ turned out to be more of a ‘stroll’.

The first half a mile was a struggle and I told myself I could walk after a mile but I got to a mile and carried on and only stopped when I got to the ditch full of water and I didn’t want to get my shoes wet as the Kent muddy water makes my shoes go hard and give me blisters (unlike the London water which doesn’t) and so I stood there for a while trying to see which was the shallowest bit and I wondered if I could tightrope walk over the bit of metal railing that was also in the ditch along with the rubbish and shopping trollies and I decided that tightrope walking probably wasn’t the best idea seeing as I have trouble balancing at the best of times and so I kind of step stoned across the railing onto the other side of the ditch and managed not to fall over and I ran down the grassy bank and walked up the slopey bit and looked at my Garmin which told me I was going really slowly and I thought I’m really slow but hey ho at least I’m on the go and wondered if that should go in my poetry portfolio but decided against it and carried on and through the housing estate and down the trail and there was a man standing by the gate and I wondered why he was just standing there but then I caught a glimpse of a hi-vis bit and thought maybe he was another runner and when I got closer I saw it was the ginger man I’ve seen out running a few times and he was stretching and he smiled and said morning or at least that’s what my lip reading skills told me he said and I carried on past the sheep field but the sheep weren’t there and I started walking and told myself I’ll start running again when I got to the gate and then I thought there’s no reason to wait until I get to the gate and I started running again and I was on the uphill bit then I saw the letterbox which signifies the start of the downhill bit and I ran down the hill and my Garmin said I’d done 2.9 miles and so I wanted to round it up to 3 and ran past the house and up to the gap that leads up to the end of the garden and that took me up to 3 miles and Shaun was up a tree cutting the branches off and I said look, I’ve done 3 miles and most of it was running, yay.

Stats
Distance: 3.01 miles
Time: slow
Pace: slow
Calories: 284
Hocus pocus believing boyfriends: 1
Ginger men: 1
Sheep: 0

Music
Erasure
Philip Glass
Hole
Rage Against the Machine

Shaun put on his Trion:Z the other day then said how good he felt after a run and how it must be due to the bracelet. I said he didn’t believe in all that hocus pocus and he agreed with me but then said I must put mine back on again anyway. Ooh, I thought, things did start to go downhill after I stopped wearing it. Maybe my running has been so crap because I stopped wearing the magic bracelet and nothing at all to do with the fact that I stopped running or going to the gym regularly a few months ago.

After doing spin yesterday for the first time in months, my legs had been aching all afternoon but this morning, after putting on the Trion:Z last night, my legs were fine. So, I say ‘pah’ to your hocus pocus, the Trion:Z is indeed a magic bracelet with hidden super powers. (For the funniest blog post ever about these magic bracelets, see Notmuchofarunner’s blog post from last Juneathon.)

Because I was so rejuvenated and fully charged with magnetic electrode ions and stuff, I skipped out of bed as soon as my alarm went off this morning. Ok, I ignored my alarm and got up two hours later than planned, but I did get out of the house in a record-breaking 40 minutes after getting up and cycled down to the gym for my body pump class.

I got there with enough time for ten minutes warm up on the rowing machine then went over to the studio where the classes are held. Usually there’s a queue of people waiting to get in while the previous class finishes, but today there was no one there and people were coming out of the studio. Peeking through the window in the door, I could see some familiar faces in there from when I regularly went to body pump before I started uni, so I thought the time of the previous class must have changed and so I went in, striding through the class looking for a space. Then I realised that there were only mats on the floor and no benches or weights. Then I realised that everyone was looking at me. Then I realised that the previous class hadn’t finished and I’d just walked through the middle of a body balance class. Hoping no one had noticed me, I turned round and walked back out with my head down and stood outside for bit wondering if I could face going back in again at the appropriate time or maybe I should just go home and die of shame but I decided to be brave and stick around for the body pump class. After nipping off quickly to get some more water, I returned to the studio and waited outside like a normal person for the class to finish before going in.

Once inside, I got my usual spot by the pillar (so I can use it to help me balance when we’re doing the bending one leg up with one hand thing) and got my weights.

I hadn’t been for ages and although there were lots of familiar faces, I was hoping no one thought I was a New Year Noob and I wanted to shout out I’M NOT A NEW YEAR NOOB, I’VE BEEN STUDYING LINGUISTICS ON A FRIDAY MORNING SINCE SEPTEMBER AND BELIEVE ME COMING TO BODY PUMP WOULD BE FAR MORE FUN THAN LEARNING ABOUT MORPHEMES AND ADVERBIALS* but I managed to remember all the moves and keep in time to the instructor and apart from the bit where we have to lay on our backs and the abs bit, it was great fun. I love body pump.

Then I went back into the gym and did 20 minutes on the rowing machine and 20 minutes on the elliptical-trainer.

Stats
Cycling: 5.11 miles
Rowing machine: 30 minutes
Elliptical trainer: 20 minutes
Body pump: 45 minutes
People striding through an ongoing gym class: 1
New Year Noobs: 0

*There is such a thing as an adverbial, even if Shaun says my tutor is talking bollocks and making up words. Just don’t ask me what one is, as I’ve forgotten, even if I did get a 2:1 for my essay (just thought I’d stick that bit in…).

It’s only taken me until day 4 but today I got dressed in my running gear, took my Garmin outside to get a signal and waited for the accuracy thing to get under 40ft while I stood there with The Cure’s ‘Accuracy’ in my head.

When it was ready, I switched my iPod on and appropriately enough, the first track to come on was the Audiofuel Juneathon mix (I think a Juneathon mix is appropriate enough for Janathon, don’t you?) and so I started off on my run and dragged myself slowly round my  usual 1.5 mile route and got home and thought yes, I really must defer my Virgin London Marathon place.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The initial europhoria of getting the happy face magazine landing on the doormat wore off quicker than half a Junior Disprin when I thought about the crappy times I’d done for my recent two half-marathons and the amount of training it would entail. But I had six months to train and it wasn’t like I was a complete newbie and after getting some encouraging comments from people, felt inspired again to train for it, especially when I won a wonderful prize from Sole UK, which consisted of them adopting me and providing me with running gear, a personal trainer, nutritionist, gym membership and loads of other stuff to get me ready for 22nd April.

As assignment deadlines loomed and I caught three colds in two months, my training slacked off. Then it was my birthday which was spent in Paris, then Christmas, then New Year and my training ground to a halt as I spent more time in the pub than in the gym and so today I decided that there was no way I would be able to train properly and do the marathon and Sole UK justice and I would be deferring my place.

Still, this gives me over a year to get my training back to how it should be and have already thought about maybe training for the Paddock Wood Half instead (warning: clicking on the link will transport you back to the 90s).

Stats
Distance: 1.55 miles
Time: 18:08
Pace: 11:44 m/m
Calories: 162
Juneathon mixes: 1
VLM places deferred: 1

After having not eaten since Saturday, my energy levels are low and so a run still wasn’t going to happen, but I had thought I’d walk my little .75 route but after listening to the wind rattling through all the chimneys all night and waking up to see trees bending in half in torrential rain, decided against it. I spent a bit of time to see what my fellow Janathoners have been up to and saw that Warriorwoman had been on her rowing machine. Aha! I thought, we’ve got a rowing machine in the conservatory, I’ll go on that. Although the rowing machine is my favourite machine in the gym (after the machine that sells crisps), I don’t enjoy going on our rowing machine at all. I don’t know why; maybe because the rowing machine in the gym tells me I’ve burned about 150 calories in 20 minutes and the one here tells me I’ve burned about 40 in the same time. Slightly disheartening.

I put on my slippers scientifically advanced state of the art hi-tech cross-training shoes

and rowed for 10 minutes.

Hardcore, huh?

Stats (rowing)
Strokes: 300
Time: 10 minutes
Calories: 17.3
Pairs of scientifically advanced state of the art hi-tech cross-training shoes: 1
Janathons completed: 3/3

It definitely wasn’t a gallop. In fact, I didn’t even make it round the garden as it was too dark and so I only went round half the garden and I didn’t even run it, just sort of walked a bit. My Garmin spent longer finding a signal than I spent walking.

My slackery knows no bounds today.

Stats

Distance: half a garden
Time: don’t know, my Garmin doesn’t do nanoseconds
Pace: slackery pace
Calories: Maybe half a calorie, tops?

I was going to recreate last year’s Dressing Gown Dash but as I stayed out all night, I didn’t have my dressing gown on and so after a bit of tweeting with Travelling Hopefully (Tweeting with Cassie = being nagged by Cassie), said I’d go for a gallop round the garden, mostly because ‘garden gallop’ sounded cool.

I put on my clown shoes

opened the back door and was greeted by this

Yes, it was a bit dark and a bit wet and a bit minging but after going back upstairs and consulting on Twitter if sitting in a car for 16 miles was enough for Janathon and being told ‘NO’ (by fairweatherrunner), I had to go and do a run.

I was going to do a proper Miranda style gallop – you know, the bit where she says “Running -  wrong unless professionally or as a child.  As an adult you should only run if you’re near a train station and look at your watch first. And you certainly can’t gallop like kids”. I can’t describe how much I love that clip. I can’t even describe how rare it is for me to want to swap places with a 6 ft fat chick but I would swap lots of things (except my cat) to be as funny as Miranda. I really really really really really (and I don’t care how many times my tutor would kill me for repeating words) wanted to find a video clip of Miranda doing the galloping thing but I COULDN’T FUCKING FIND ONE and I only wanted to blog so I could use that video clip and so I wasn’t going to blog at all but then remembered the stupid Janathon rules (who started this stupid Janathon thing anyway? Oh, yes, it was me. Meh, stupid me) and so I had to blog.

I think that’s the end.

Janathon day 1.

Yay, go me.

Oh, hang on. I did my run, then rescued the champagne from the fridge.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Stats
Distance: round the garden
Time: not very long really
Pace: um…
Janathons done: 1/1

This was by far the most nerve-wracking part of the whole thing for me. I really didn’t see how all the blogs could be checked and verified and counted and everything else and I was sooooooo scared I’d give the prizes to the wrong people.

But, with the help of my wonderful volunteer blog-checkers, between us and the Running Free Online website, I can now reveal for definite the winners of this year’s Janathon.

All prizes (you can see them here on the Janathon website) have been donated by Audiofuel, Talk Talk and Polaroid Sunglasses.

In first place:

Local Adventures

Gary wins a Garmin 405, which I hope has a coffee maker attached to it, as I’m sure after running an immense 450 miles throughout January, he probably needs some caffeine to keep him awake.

In second place:

…musing…

I’m sure we all had great fun in the early days watching Gary and Kevin battling it out for the top spot on the leaderboard. I could smell the testosterone from here.

Kevin ran 313 miles in January and wins £100 worth of Wiggle vouchers.

In third place:

2011 Miles

Well, one half of them, anyway. I’m not sure how Jules found the time to run with the amount of time he spent on Twitter and keeping tabs on what everyone else was up to but he managed to fit in 254 miles of running and has won a pair of Polaroid Sunglasses.

In fourth place:

runtezza

Just two miles behind Jules, Terry ran a massive 252 miles for Janathon and wins £50 worth of Audiofuel compilations.

In fifth place:

Painted Runner

I’m glad Lena likes running, as she’s just won a year’s subscription to Runner’s World for running 179 miles.

Each one, of course, blogged every day too. Well done all of you, it’s an amazing achievement.

How to claim your prizes:

Gary, you can claim yours personally at the post-Janathon lunch.

The rest of you, please email me at cathy@janathon.com with your addresses please.

Right, that’s that. Now I don’t want to hear the ‘J’ word ever again.