Category: Janathon

The JogBlog guide to not looking like a New Year Newbie

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It’s that time of year every seasoned gym-goer dreads. The time of year when there are two questions whizzing round their heads:

1. Will the newbies be hogging all the machines; and

2. Will everyone think I’m a newbie too?

This morning, I had planned to go to the gym and these were the questions I had in my head so, upon opening my kit drawer, I pulled out an old pair of running tights and grabbed a t-shirt but eek, the t-shirt was a salmony-pink colour and nothing screams NEWBIE as much as pink does.

Then there was the shoe dilemma. I have two pairs of running shoes that I haven’t even tried on yet, let alone wear, but – like pink – new shoes are a no no if you don’t want to be mistaken for a newbie so I put on the purple pair I’ve recently been wearing to the gym and they even had a bit of mud on them. Result.

And yes, I know we all had to start somewhere, so I’m not really mocking (although a bit of ‘spot the newbie’ fun in the gym does help to pass the time), especially as my newbie runner kit seven years ago consisted of thick baggy tracksuit bottoms, a cotton t-shirt, a heavy hooded fleece, two normal bras worn at the same time and a pair of trainers that cost me £10 from Shoe Zone.

I needn’t have worried though, there were no newbies in the gym, just the three ‘older’ people who are usually there in the morning and I did my usual rowing machine/cross-trainer/treadmill combo without having to wait for newbies to stop hogging the machines.

Stats
Pairs of old running tights: 1
Salmony-pink t-shirts: 1
Pairs of purple trainers with a bit of mud on them: 1
Newbies in the gym: 0
Rowing machine: 20 minutes
Cross-trainer: 20 minutes
Treadmill: 20 minutes
Music
Courtney Love – Sunset Strip
Duran Duran – Electric Barberella
David Holmes – I Heard Wonders
The Black Keys – Lonely Boy
Soft Cell – Sex Dwarf
Calvin Harris – Feel So Close
Ghostpoet – I Just Don’t Know
Knifeworld – In A Foreign Way
U2 – Vertigo
Eugene McGuinness – Shotgun
The Polyphonic Spree – Running Away
The Secret Machines – Lightning Blue Eyes

Janathon Day 2–Rowing with a 5ft smiley for company

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I don’t know if a conservatory is still a conservatory if you* put a proper ceiling on it, but anyway, the conservatory now has a proper ceiling on it which means it’s warm enough to use all year now. And what do you do when you* decorate the conservatory in your** 18th Century Grade II Listed house? That’s right, you* paint a five foot smiley on the ceiling.

smiley

(Excuse the mess, it hasn’t been tidied up yet.)

Anyway, the smiley room is where the rowing machine lives and as I couldn’t be arsed to leave the house, the rowing machine is what I did for today’s Janathon.

Stats
Conservatories with proper ceilings on: 1
5ft smileys on the ceiling: 1
Rowing machine: 20 minutes

*Boyfriend
*Boyfriend’s

The long way round to Tesco

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Everyone shamed me today. All day I’ve been seeing everyone’s updates on the Facebook page or on Twitter about how they’ve Janathoned. I was still in my dressing gown until about 4pm when I eventually got out on the bike.

Because it was dark, this limited my choices of where to cycle (stupid countryside with its stupid roads with no pavements) so Shaun said we’d cycle to Tesco, but go the long way round.

Tesco is only a quarter of a mile away, but with our detour, it was a 2 mile trip. Well, it’s better than my dressing gown dash, isn’t it?

Stats (cycling)
Distance: 2 miles
Time: 15:33
Dressing gowns on until 4pm: 1
Long ways round to Tesco: 1
Janathons completed 1/1

Just an ordinary shop girl

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I’ve always wanted to work in a shop. I can remember saying to my mum when I was 16 and she wanted me to go to secretarial college and I said I’d rather work in a shop than be stuck in an office. Then she bribed me with £100 (I’m not that cheap these days) and so I went to secretarial college and got stuck in an office for twenty-two years.

Anyway, now I’ve got a shop. Ok, it’s only a virtual one, but I’m quite excited. It’s a Janathon shop and you can buy lots of Janathon things like t-shirts, hoodies, bags, mugs, and – my favourite – a dog t-shirt.

janathon_dog_tshirt

So, off you go then, visit my Cafe Press Janathon shop and fill your boots!

Janathon 2013 – go on, you know you want to!

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Yee ha, entries for Janathon 2013 are now open!

For those of you who haven’t a clue what a Janathon is, it’s a yearly challenge held in – unsurprisingly – January. Taking part is simple – all you have to do is run and blog every day. If you don’t want to run every day, you can do some other form of exercise, it’s up to you (although if you want to be among the truly hardcore, you’ll need to run every day).

It’s a great way to get fit, make new friends, get new readers to your blog and gain more Twitter followers (if you’re fussed about that kind of thing), so go and sign up now at the Janathon website.

Oh, and there’s a post-Janathon party at the end in London, too, where we eat pasta and pizza and drink lots of beer. Why else do you think I continue with this madness?

I have excelled myself in my lameness

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This Janathon was the lamest effort of all the ‘athons so far. Oh well, Juneathon isn’t that far away and I can redeem myself then.

Today I cycled about 2.2 miles to the station, then about .8 miles to uni, then I didn’t even have to cycle back, as Shaun picked me up on the way back from his dad’s.

The shame.

I’ll do a ‘thank you for joining in’ post and announce the ‘winner’ (even if anyone who’s been checking the leaderboard on Running Free Online will know who it is anyway (especially as it’s now February in his time zone so he finished before everyone else)) tomorrow.

In the meantime, well done everyone who completed Janathon 2012 and good luck to those of you still to complete it!

Stats (cycling)
Distance: about 2.89 miles (I didn’t Garmin it)
Time: about 20 minutes
Speed: not very fast
Pitiful Janathon efforts from me: 1

A is for anally retentive

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Anal retention, or attention to detail? Hmm, let’s look at this in more detail and decide.

As I said the other day, It Ain’t Fast and it Ain’t Pretty asked on Twitter for volunteers to draw the letters of JANATHON with their GPS watches. I drew the O and Shaun said he’d do the A.

Being the perfectionist he is, he got me to type an A (originally in Times New Roman, then I decided a without wiggly bits sans serif font would be easier. We also thought a lower case ‘a’ would be easier but Shaun decided to make it difficult for himself) on Word then blow it up big so he could work out how best to do it, then he got all technical with a calculator and measurements and stuff and plotted it all out on a piece of paper

janathon 043

and off we went to a field to do the deed. The field was full of sheep

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but they didn’t seem to mind a small bloke whipping out a tape measure

janathon 022

and planting socks on the ground

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ably assisted by his able assistant

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but then the sheep did seem to be a bit confused

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and ran away

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while Shaun carried on plotting

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and plotting

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and then I spotted this sign which made me cry with errant apostrophe anger (although it didn’t make me as angry as I got when Shaun for some unknown reason said ‘my bad’ about something – I told him there were not enough special or extenuating circumstances in the world for me to let him off saying ‘my bad’)

janathon 039

and then Shaun ran his A and I thought after all the effort he had put in to plotting it, the least I could do was video it.

Update

I can’t believe I uploaded all those photos and a video but didn’t actually post the picture of the legendary A. I am a der-brain. Here it is.

A

Good innit?

Shaun has blogged his A run here.

Stats
Janathon As: 1

Almost forgot about Janathon

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Despite reading Janathon blogs and tweets, and Shaun putting on his running gear, I completely forgot I was a Janathon participant and was actually supposed to be doing something myself today. I didn’t want to do anything but as Shaun said he was going to run for an hour, I thought the least I could do is go for a walk. So I walked for half a mile and turned round but I misjudged it and got back to the house at .95 of a mile which is where a long driveway comes in handy as after walking up to the end of it and back down to the front door, that took me nicely up to a nice round mile.

Stats (walking)
Distance: 1 mile
Time: 17:10
Speed: 17:08
Janathons nearly forgot about: 1

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