The holidays are over!

Merry/Happy etcetera, etcetera... 

Yes, I can believe it's 2016. No I haven't made any resolutions. Why? If you need to ask then you've clearly never made any. 

Have I been for a run this year yet? YES. Yes I have. Today. 

Ok, so it was the first time in about a month but please save your pointed disappointed stares, my aching legs and semi-burst lungs tomorrow morning will be punishment enough. Oh, and just in case you think it's not a sufficient punishment then you'll be happy to know I've signed myself up for a beginner's spin class too. The first lesson is this Thursday which will give me just enough time for walking to become bearable again. The almost certain leg agony aside, I am excited to be mixing things up with my training as I have to admit I was starting to get a tad bored of just running all the time and this will also be a good way to kick start this year.

Speaking of which, this year is actually going to be a pretty big one for me. 

2016 is the year in which I will be turning 25. I will be getting married and letting go of the only surname I have ever known. I'll be going on my honeymoon. I will be running a half marathon in February and hopefully take part in a mini triathlon in July. Last but not least I will be planning a potential trans-Atlantic move which is both terrifying and exciting and may not actually happen until 2017.

So, here's hoping this year goes well for me in all my endeavours and for you all in yours!

Hurty feet indeed.

When I named this blog "My Feet Hurt!" I did it half jokingly. I was expecting my feet to be a tad sore from all that pavement pounding. I even expected a minor injury, perhaps from putting my foot down funny or slipping on some gravel, all of which I am told are the common perils of running. So when my first foot injury arose on Friday you'd think I'd have been celebrating. I would now be able to proudly show off my battle scars, proof of my dedication to my chosen exercise regime. Not so. I didn't hurt my foot out running. How, you ask, did I injure myself? A slip? A fall? No, no, no. 

My shoe bit me. 

Yes you read that right. Friday night I made my way to the tube station to go to my fiancé's work party, and my shoe bit me. My sensible, flat shoes that I had worn specifically with the aim of preventing foot injury. The sensible shoes I was planning on later swapping for the highly impractical 5 inch heels. My sensible shoes have a funny sense of irony that's all I'm going to say. In all honesty I had noticed a slight pinching sensation on my (5 minute) walk to the station, but I figured I must have just got something stuck in the shoe. Picture my shocked, disbelieving face when I pull the offending shoe off at the station to find my heel completely red with blood. Blood! My sensible shoes made my foot bleed! This is the type of injury I would expect had I decided to run a marathon in my aforementioned 5 inch heels! Or just taken part in an Army-style march across the Brecon Beacons. In the rain. 

My lady readers might understand this sentiment more than my male ones, but you place your trust in your sensible shoes and mine betrayed me. Traitors. 

Anyway, for those of you who like seeing this kind of thing, I have thoughtfully included a photo of my heel. It has healed over somewhat now and is no longer actively bleeding (yay) but still hurts to the point where conventional shoes (ie: anything that's not a welly or a flip flop) are agony to wear. 

Oh, and for those of you (probably not) wondering what happened to my night out? Well I went to the work party anyway, in my pretty knee-length cocktail dress with my handsome dinner-suited-up fiancé. And what did I put on my feet? 

Flip flops. I wore flip flops. 

PS: special shout out to my fiancé who left work early to go on a mid-winter mission to find and buy me said flip flops.

Milestones

Since I started running back in May and started this blog I feel like I have reached many different milestones. I ran my first race back in July, I joined not one but two different running clubs, I can now run 5k without stopping or feeling like I'm about to die and I've met loads of new people who share this crazy desire to run around outside in the cold for some crazy reason. All of this is wonderful and I'm super happy for myself. One milestone has always eluded me however. Not because I couldn't reach it but because I always avoided it. Well, this past weekend I finally let myself get there.

I went for a run with my fiancé. 

I know, you were probably expecting something slightly more dramatic right? What you have to understand is that my fiancé was in the army for 5 years and, even on an off day, is a million times fitter than I am. This has always made me slightly apprehensive to go running with him. I always had visions of me huffing and puffing on hands and knees fifty metres behind him while he runs at a tenth of his normal pace. So I decided to wait until I would be able to keep up and show him how much I'd improved. (Pride is a funny thing isn't it?) 

Anyway, the run went really well. Yes, he did have to slow down so I could keep up but not to the cartoon-like exaggerated extent I had been picturing. Yes, at the end of the run I was in large amounts of pain. On the upside, the reason for the large amounts of pain was that his naturally faster pace made me speed up to try and not slow him down too horrendously. Which resulted in me shaving two more minutes off my time! 

So here we are. One more demon defeated. One more milestone reached. 

Basically, yay me. 

The end of a (tiny) era.

This Monday was my last run club lesson in South Oxhey. It feels like it was just yesterday that I started that course and yet eight whole weeks have passed. It started out with around ten of us not being able to run for more than a couple of minutes without needing to stop and re-inflate our lungs, and ended with about four of us (the hardcore four!) running for thirty minutes non stop, up and down hills, chatting away. Lungs of steel obviously fully developed! 

I have to say I am genuinely going to miss run club on Mondays. It was a really invigorating way to start my week and it was great to be able to do it with a group. The next thing we will probably do as a group will be triathlon training but that won't be until April (more on that later). In the meantime my Tuesday run club in my town is still going strong and, hopefully, I have managed to convince one of the Monday girls to come join me and the Tuesday lot. So yay!

An extra positive to add to all of this is that the trainer from Monday run club has very kindly put together a training plan for me to help me increase my running distance and actually be able to do the half marathon I signed up for in Brighton at the end of February. So if you were thinking that activity levels would drop around Christmas you were wrong! Ha. 

I leave you with an oh so attractive photo of the four of us hardcore ladies that made it all the way from lesson 1 to the final lesson 8. Many high fives were given. 

End of week 8

Marathon Misery

As you all know, last April I entered the ballot for the London Marathon and this October I got the email saying that I hadn't managed to get a spot. Gutted to say the least. I have considered going down the charity place route but having had a look at the options I seriously doubt I will be able to raise the (scarily large) required amounts in time at this point. This means I am having to think outside the box a tad. This blog is about going from zero to marathon in a year so I need to find a marathon to run. I have found a couple of other marathon options which could work for me timing wise. However, a new option has just presented itself to me today: a triathlon. 

I have to admit I have never really given much serious thought to the idea of a triathlon. I have friends who have completed many and even a couple of friends who have completed an Iron Man. Which is just beyond human. So why a triathlon? Well the lady who runs my Monday run club is also a certified triathlon coach and she sent out an email today about a triathlon course she is thinking of running at some point in the near future. I registered my interest in a sort of spur of the moment burst of optimistic thinking which I am sure I will later come to regret. Still, I have to start somewhere, right?

The point is that, while I can say with 99.99% confidence that I will not be running the London Marathon in 2016, I will definitely be taking part in either a marathon or a triathlon. Who knows, I might do both! How's that for optimism?

Bang goes the other shoe!

Remember my last post where I talked about how everything was feeling good and I was getting the hang of things, and that it all made me very nervous and I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop? Well, drop it did. I have to hand it to those Running Gods their vengeance is swift. This time it took the form of a stinking cold which appeared on Saturday and stuck around until Friday, meaning I missed both running classes (and my dog's training class too but that's off topic). Normally I wouldn't worry about missing a run but the problem with missing a class is that they all move onwards and upwards without you. So when I came back to class yesterday I was told that we would be running for 6 minutes and walking for 1. The last class I had done with the group we ran for 2.5 minutes and walked for 1. Quite the jump in my opinion! Obviously I set off way too fast and spent the rest of the time mentally kicking myself for it. As we got to the last repetition I genuinely felt like crawling and am amazed I managed to make the drive home without my legs spontaneously dropping off. 

I woke up this morning slightly stiff (to be expected I guess) dreading this evening's run club. I battled the urge to miss this one too and dragged myself there only to find I was one of only two others who had managed to come along. While that made me feel happy (in a sort of proud we-are-so-hardcore way) it also meant that somehow the pace was sneakily increased to the point where, not only did we run 4K non stop but we also ran it faster than we ever have before, shaving three whole minutes off our time from two weeks ago. This makes me very happy. It also makes me very worried. Worried about how achy my poor, barely recovered body will feel tomorrow. 

Still, three minutes faster. Boom. 

When did that happen?

Yesterday I had a sort of out of body experience. Well, not really an out of body experience exactly. Not like the ones you hear about, when people are dying in hospital and they say they just floated up out of their body and watched themselves down below. I didn't have that. What I had would maybe be better described as an "out of personal context" experience? I know that's not much better. Bear with me and I'll try to explain. 

I have been doing my Tuesday run club now for four weeks and my Monday one for two. Last week I did my Monday class, my Tuesday club, and I went for a run on the Thursday too. It was only yesterday, halfway through my 4k run with the ladies from run club (that's right, 4k without stopping, check us out!) that I realised I had become the person I used to watch running down the street, on their second out of four potential runs that week. That infuriating, super motivated person who didn't look like they were actively dying right there on the street. There I was, in the freezing cold, dark October evening, jogging along quite happily, chatting to the ladies about how easy this was all getting. (Chatting while running! Actual speech creating capabilities. While running!)

Seriously when did that happen? I can't remember there being an actual moment where this transition noticeably came about but somehow, running is no longer wholly unpleasant for me. It's not fun, let's not exaggerate now, but it is definitely not unpleasant. 

I do feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop though. Like maybe the Running Gods are just lulling me into a lovely false sense of achievement before they make me twist my ankle or some such punishment. While I wait for the other shoe to drop I plan to revel in this realisation that I am edging ever closer to being able to call myself a proper runner. "Proper" by the standards which I have set for myself, not any ridiculous standards set by those photoshopped running magazine ladies. (Psst: they're not real!).