The Fat Bloke Diaries

[pjlla]

I'm sad. I just found your DELIGHTFUL FBD today and it has gotten me through this boring day at school in a non-boring fashion. I actually laughed out loud and SNORTED at one of your exploits! Good thing the room was empty at the time! I rushed back from my lunch break to be sure I could finish the page I was on before the next group of children arrived. But now.... I have 10 more minutes and nothing left to read.

I'm going to post a link to this thread over on the WISH board (where I spend lots of time). The folks there will really get a kick out of this and will be able to relate!

Good luck on your continued weight loss/eat healthy/exercise plan.............P

 

[proudmomof4]

I did indeed go for option B. I had just a small bowl of pasta, and suffered much family heckling. I love them all greatly. Honest, I do. But sometimes, when everyone's together, it can be a bit much.

Good for you, let them heckle all they want.

By the way, I am still sticking with the wii fit and have now lost a total of 1 pound, not much, but at least it's progress. I am seeing a big difference in the fit of my clothes and even had to go down a size.

 

[dizluvah]

I wanted to spend quite a bit of time composing a witty reply but then I realized I have spent more time then I care to admit reading this entire thread in one sitting.

I love your posts and especially appreciate your definitions/clarifications for your American readers. The extent of my English cultural reference knowledge comes from watching Top Gear. I was with you at Subway but you lost me at Motorway. We have highways, interstates, state routes, scenic byways but no motorways.

Seriously, many thanks for sharing your stories. These updates have brightened my day and possibly guilted me into dusting off my wii fit (which I HAD to have and overpaid on ebay for) as well as my treadmill which currently functions as my coat rack.

 

[sharper_fin]

Thanks everyone, it's always heartening to know that this stuff is being read.
And if anyone is confused by any of my terms, just ask. As George Bernard Shaw said, England and America are two countries separated by a common language".

Of course I'm going to be losing lots of weight in a few weeks when I escape cold & rainy England for hot and steamy Florida for a while! We always lose lots of weight spending all day in the parks (no lunchtime break for us! Oh no. Mad dogs & Englishmen....).

 

[DisneyGalUK]

Ive been following from the beginning, loving your writing style! Out of all the things you have written, the quote below moved me to reply:

Thirty-five years of watching Sheffield United has taught me that.
© 2008 Shaun Finnie

My team! Mentioned on a Disney website - by a fellow fan who I *think* lives in the same area as me Small world!

 

[sharper_fin]

THE FAT BLOKE DIARIES

Episode Twenty-Five – Reviewing the Situation

Who’d have thought that we’d get this far? FBD 25. A silver jubilee, six months of fat blokery.

When I started on this life-changing adventure I was twenty-some pounds heavier than I am today and a whole lot more sedentary. I was a fair bit richer too, because I had yet to buy any exercise equipment.

But things have changed. I walk much more. I run. I static-bike. I make up verbs (see previous sentence). I exercise with the help of various virtual trainers on my TV, and I avoid crisps and chocolate wherever possible. But it’s just sometimes not possible.

At the turn of the year I set the following resolutions

• I will keep up the good work health-wise that I’ve started this year.
• I will lose more weight.
• I will continue to eat less rubbish.
• I will up my exercise levels.

A quarter of the way through 2009 and I’ve mostly stuck to these goals. I can’t honestly say that I’m totally in control of my eating though. Try as I might, I keep getting possessed by the spirit of Big Bobby Chompalot, World Pie-Eating Champion 1927. Probably. There are still times when I surprise myself by finding a half-eaten cheese sandwich in my hand. It’s like I can’t help myself. Some people get voices in their head telling them to do evil things. At least mine only encourage me to help the country’s dairy farmers.

So I’ve only been partially successful in keeping to my resolutions, but the overall position is still a positive one. And it’s being noticed.

A few of the guys in the office (where I’m still walking to the eighth floor every day) have commented that I look thinner. One woman asked what I was doing to lose weight. I told her that I had started running and a few other things. As we spoke I noticed her gaze started slowly slipping downwards from my face (ladies, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about). Her eyes stopped at my still-considerable belly.

“You? Run?” she said, incredulously. “But aren’t you too….?”

I was waiting for her to complete the sentence, ready for her to drop the dreaded ‘F’ word. I had two words with ‘F’ in them in my carefully prepared reply, and neither of them was ‘friendly’.

But she’s right; despite some early weight loss I am still fat. The majority of my natural insulation is refusing to budge despite a little diet and a lot of exercise. If I’m to seriously decrease my portliness I need a long term goal, something that I can work towards with achievable checkpoints along the way.

So with this in mind, a few weeks ago I did something stupid. It was so incredibly ridiculous that I ‘forgot’ to report it in the FBD at the time. Actually it may turn out to be one of the smartest things I’ve ever done but immediately afterwards it felt pretty dumb, scarily so. As a fully fledged, card carrying Fat Bloke with an almost pathological fear of being seen exercising in public, I signed myself up for the Great Yorkshire Run.

I’ll pause for a moment so that you can digest that last bit.

It’s true, I’m doing a 10k run.

I know, unbelievable isn’t it? Ten whole kilometres. That will be over an hour of shuffling through the streets of Sheffield. I’ve done that many times in the past, but rarely without several hours of fortification in The Hog’s Head first. I’ll be heaving my no-doubt increasingly reluctant body around more than six miles of Sheffield’s finest tarmac. And I’ll be even more reluctant to do the bit that goes through Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium. Being a lifelong Sheffield United fan, I may have my eyes shut for that section.

This is my Everest (even though it’s flat), and through the next twenty-odd FBDs you’ll hopefully be with me from base camp to planting my metaphorical flag at the pinnacle. It’ll be hard work, it’ll be exhausting but (hopefully) it’ll be fun.

And it will undoubtedly be A GOOD THING.

Oh, and I lied earlier. It wasn’t just a few weeks ago. I signed up well before Christmas but I was keeping it quiet, ‘just in case’ I decided to quit.

But now you know. So there’s no going back.


© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

[mrsklamc]

Someone posted this link over on the W.I.S.H. board on Thursday and I read the entire thing immediately. I reminded myself to come subscribe today, and how delightful to find a new post!

So what's the date of this 10k?

 

[sharper_fin]

My 10k (that's 6.2 miles) is 6th of September. There's still plenty of time for training. I'm training at a pace that is difficult (for me) but doable. Wish me luck!

 

[sharper_fin]

THE FAT BLOKE DIARIES

Episode Twenty-Six - Mean Streets

How can one little announcement cause so much fuss? Not since Harold MacMillan shouted through his toilet window, "I have in my hand a piece of paper", has so much been said by so many about so few words.

"I'm doing a 10k run".

I always receive some responses to every FBD, but that one line in last week's edition opened the floodgates.

I've had messages of surprise, delight, concern and disbelief, but overall support and encouragement. Thanks to you all, that's very much appreciated. I hope you're all behind me just as much when I come asking for your cash; I'm doing the run as a fundraiser. Or as my aged mother put it, 'Is it a bit like a sponsored walk then?'

I'm running to raise money for the British Heart Foundation. More details will be forthcoming later, but for the moment, please just prepare yourself to dig deep.

Times are hard for charities at this time, as they are for all of us. Even Chelsea have stopped snapping up footballers for the price of a hospital wing. Criminals and opportunist thieves too are becoming more desperate. Despite the fact that I don't look the most affluent Johnny from the block, even I've fallen victim to an attempted daylight mugging.

I should have seen the danger immediately. Lonely street, two young guys in baseball caps walked towards me, gave each other a nod and a wink, moved apart so that I could pass between them.

I'd just got beyond them, through the gap between their Burberry jackets, when they turned and pounced. One grabbed me from behind while the other pressed his face tight against mine and screamed for my wallet while fumbling inside my jacket pocket. They were terrifying. They were fuelled by testosterone and cheap lager. They were all of sixteen.

I'm not a little chap, never have been. I'm also not very good at doing the sensible thing in bad situations. My inner-Hulk tends to take over. Which is why I grabbed one chap and threw him into his mate. It was now my turn to bellow at my loudest with my nose half a nanometre away from one of theirs (they had one each).

"Leave this place right now or I'll feed you his spleen". Apart from the substitution of something rather earthier for 'Leave this place' (this is a family column after all), those were the exact words that I used, I can remember them clearly. I'm still impressed by my obscure and totally off the cuff choice of threat as I held one by the lapels and jabbed my finger into the other's face. I'm not really sure where someone's spleen is or what it does, and even less what it would taste like, but I recognise the power of quick thinking and decisive action. I'm certain that both contributed to saving the day and my wallet.

They fled, hurling abuse at me even as the retreated.

So the good guy prevailed, but what if they'd turned nasty. What if, if you don't mind me slipping into Bouncer-speak for a moment, 'it had all kicked off'? Should I have gone down the self defence route and piled in, or just gone down under a hail of body-blows? Probably the latter. Despite the initial bravado and bluff that got me out of this nasty situation, I couldn't have sustained my anger. I'm stupid, but not that stupid. Or drunk.

My mate Stuart tells me how he's started boxercise at his gym, how he loves it so much that he'd even installed a heavy bag in his garage.. I can easily imagine him punching and kicking seven shades of poo-poo out of his bag, but Stuart is one of the nicest people I know; I can't imagine him doing it to another human. But as stress relief and aerobic workout he says it's great.

Maybe I should take it up. I could become the 'Barnsley Chuck Norris' and practice roundhouse kicks to the spleen.


© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

[sharper_fin]

THE FAT BLOKE DIARIES

Episode Twenty-Seven – All Fall Down

I must be a proper runner now. Bits of me are starting to hurt.

I’ve had shin splints. I didn’t like that one but it was a valuable lesson about the importance of stretching. Not that I’ve really liked any of the niggles and aches that have come my way since I set off on this voyage of painful discoveries. They’re all unwelcome in their own special way but weirdly they’re all also rites of passage that all runners must go through. Again and again in some cases, I hear.

So currently I have mild aches on the inside of my knees, a little throbbing in the small of my back, a gentle pain in my hip and a bout of stitch that comes on regularly towards the end of my training. They’re becoming firm friends now, and I wear them like shiny badges of courage.

Of course my naturally thin and healthy Beloved carries none of these ailments. She runs as long as I do (but much faster) and doesn’t break sweat or appear out of breath. She’s a non-sickening pleasure to run with. But sometimes it’s nice to be out alone too, just me and the elements. Even in the grimmest ‘oop North’ parts of Barnsley it’s not too difficult to find fields and country lanes.

On the occasions that she sensibly declines my kind offer of running with me (usually because it’s raining, or too cold, or there’s a ‘Y’ in the day) I have to resort to other more tuneful but less shapely company.

The groovy tunes (I’m old) that have accompanied me through my life to date now carry me through my training runs. I strap my MP3 player to my arm and off I waddle. It’s a wonderful machine: small, loud and clear in delivery. If it were an actor it would be Danny DeVito enunciating Shakespeare. It’s technically better and far cheaper than the ubiquitous sexy i-machine that I deliberately avoided because I’m not in any way ‘trendy’. I’ve never been a victim of fashion and this instance is no different. My music maker clips to my arm and takes my head to places that my feet can’t, like 1973. I pound the tracks and the tracks pound my ears, each song chosen for its tempo, familiarity, uplifting theme and, above all, its complete lack of new-fangled dance music bum-tishery. I’m a fat bloke of the sixties, after all.

So the other day I had the armband on so tight that I was waiting for a doctor to say “one twelve over seventy”, and was happily shuffling along to Run to the Hills (Run? Hills? That’s not scheduled on my training plan for weeks yet!) by that popular beat combo Iron Maiden, when suddenly something small and black flew in front of my face. I thought it was a tiny bird at first, but then it shot back in front of my eyes in a sort of strange swinging motion. It was my precious little MP3 box. My erratic footfall had jostled it free from its arm clip and sent it hurtling around on its cable.

Stupidly I never thought to stop. I guess I was swept along by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (there’s a proper old NME term for you), or perhaps my very small brain was simply too busy forcing my burning lungs to contract and expand to think about it. I ran on, the minute player swinging like a lasso around my head and Bruce Dickinson bellowing with all his might in my ears. I fully expected the sounds to stop at any moment and to see the little machine fly into the distance but it, and apparently Iron Maiden, are made of sterner stuff. The cable is quite long and has a clip that I attach to my shirtfront. This clip held and amazingly so did the jack plug. Still the player played on and I jogged on.

Something had to give, and inevitably it was good old faithful gravity that brought a halt to proceedings. It overcame the centrifugal force of the flying yet tethered sound box and brought it curving down in a graceful loop around my legs. I didn’t really have time to appreciate the pure mathematical beauty of the arc though, as I came perilously close to doing a passable impression of an Imperial Walker downed by the entangling cable of a Rebel Snowspeeder. What, am I the only Star Wars fan here?

And of course with perfect comedic timing that was the moment that the group of ramblers appeared, doing their s******ing best to avoid the sweaty aging rocker with the bondage fetish.


© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

[DW2DH&DS]

...as I came perilously close to doing a passable impression of an Imperial Walker downed by the entangling cable of a Rebel Snowspeeder. What, am I the only Star Wars fan here?


I love Star Wars, and so does my 7 year old!!! Would have paid good money to see that. Just kidding. Keep it up soon to be called "Thin Bloke!!!"

 

[sharper_fin]

THE FAT BLOKE DIARIES

Episode Twenty-Eight – Bend It Like Maya

I never understood how constellations in the sky got their names. Was there some ancient Greek enjoying a spliff with a friend one dark and moonless night, gazing into the sky at a random group of stars who said “Look, the stars make patterns. I can see a box, and there’s a cross. What can you see?” to which his friend replied, “I can see a mighty hunter with an animal skin thrown casually over one arm and a club in the other, and he’s got a huge sword dangling from a thong on his belt.”

There must have been some kind of mind-expansion going on because, being clean and sober; I certainly can’t make some of them out.

I have the same blindness when I try to get my head around some of the names given to yoga positions. A few of them make perfect sense, like the cobra pose for example. I can see how, by lying flat on my belly and arching my back, I could be doing an impression of a very large but incredibly slow striking cobra. But others? How in the holy tantric name of Sting am I to strike a pigeon pose? And why do they all seem to be named after animals? I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but we don’t get many monkeys, crocodiles or camels in the wilds of Barnsley. We’d be much more likely to name them after things like burning car or shopping trolley. We do however see a few representatives of the one yoga position that I’m comfortable with: the corpse.

That’s the one where you lie still and pretend to be dead while someone gently says “now make yourself as long as possible”. Oh, if only this were an 18 rated column. I could work an entire comedy routine out of this.

I managed the Tree position quite well too, although my version was not so much firmly grounded as swaying in a force seven gale. And there was no way that I could get my heel up to my grow-in (as Granny so wonderfully used to put it) as required. I managed to place it as high as my standing knee and there it stayed. But apart from my total lack of balance and my terrible form, I held the pose just like the teacher showed me.

Ah, the teacher. Mine is the ultra-hyper Maya (the female trainer from My Fitness Coach on my Wii). She has no concept of yoga as relaxation. Obviously, being a virtual trainer, she has no concept of anything, but she certainly doesn’t cut back on the workout part of the stretching and bending. After an hour-long gentle session with her I was creating my own new position. I lay on my side with my arms and legs outstretched, struggling for breath. I call it the Dying Dog.

I’ll have a go at most of the physical shapes that she demands of me, but don’t expect me to get involved in yoga’s mental and spiritual disciplines though. I’m far too busy trying not to fall over to meditate.

You’ll no doubt gather from all this that my British Heart Foundation-endorsed training plan has me doing lots of yoga and stretching this week alongside the more energetic stuff. That seems sensible enough; they don’t want me damaging myself before I get the chance to raise them some money. So instead of watching repeats of Doctor Who, my TV tonight is showing Yoga With Maya.

This is a good thing. I know that I don’t do enough stretching. When I get back in from a run it’s usually all I can do to breathe, let alone stretch. A few wall pushes and heel pull-ups and that’s normally it for me, but I haven’t heard anything in my leg go ‘twang!’ yet, so I can’t be doing too much wrong. I read – and it was on the internet, so it must be true – that I should stretch for up to half an hour when I return home, but it never happens. I’m also lax when it comes to warming up and down too. That should be another ten minutes on both the start and end of my session apparently. Add all that lot together and it’s a full episode of the Doctor blowing some Daleks up that I’d be missing. And it would probably be one that I’ve only seen thrice.

Maybe I should ask my Beloved to give my legs a massage when I get home. That might be nice. That might be very nice indeed.

Now there’s a thought that I really could meditate on.

© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

[sharper_fin]

THE FAT BLOKE DIARIES

Episode Twenty-Nine – In at the Deep End

I would never have done it if I’d been anywhere close to home, anywhere that I thought there was even the most remote chance that somebody I know might have seen me. But I wasn’t, so I did.

I went for a swim.

Regular readers may recall that the last time my Beloved and I had a weekend break away at a country hotel I had a sudden but easily banished (with the help of beer) desire to cast myself into the chlorine of the hotel pool. I chose not to, not least of all because I didn’t have any swimming attire with me, but I knew deep down that I’d made the wrong decision.

At the time I said ‘I’m as likely to unveil my physique at a swimming pool as I am on the stage of the Windmill Theatre ‘, and I meant every word of it. But that was then. While I’m still no Adonis, I’m much less ‘cuddly’ than I was just a few weeks ago. I’ve lost weight and I’m changing shape. Back then I was in the Barry White ‘Walrus of Lurrve’ heaviness range. Now I’m more of a harbour seal. So when we began packing for another couple of days away I made sure that there was a certain drastically under-used garment in my overnight bag.

Gentlemen of a certain age and, more importantly, a certain girth can’t easily buy clothes to swim in. We just don’t have the physique for it. We’re not thin enough to get away with a pair of Speedos, or young enough to wear surfer-dude shorts. Neither looks appropriate on a forty-something, grey haired fat bloke. This is obvious, even to someone with as little style as me, so I went for the shorts. They were most definitely the lesser of those two particular evils. They do look pretty good on me actually but I wasn’t saying that when, in my rush to get out of the staring eyes of the changing room and into the covering comfort of the water, I got my foot stuck in the waistband and fell over. Those eyes that I’d tried my very best to avoid contact with all swung in my direction…

I rushed to the water’s edge and gently lowered myself in. It’s around fifteen years since I dipped a toe into a pool, and it showed. My ungainly breaststroke gained even less than it used to. My body started off pretty horizontal, but towards the end of my allotted 30 minutes my rear was starting to sink like a holed U-Boat. But I struggled through it with a growing sense of achievement and knowledge that, here at least, my fears of being the centre of attention were unfounded.

Just a float-festooned rope divided me – in the land of the lane swimmers – from the kids playing with their balls, the courting couples showing off to each other like preening peacocks and the mothers with babies too young to walk but old enough for badly-fastened swim nappies. They were in the ‘fun’ section of the pool. I had the other half entirely to myself. Entirely, that was, until a very large lady of advancing years doddered over to join me. Good, I thought; she’ll be at the same re-beginner level as me.

Wrong.

She took several deep breaths to prepare herself then shot off like a Laura Ashley-clad torpedo. Head down, breathing every three strokes, she tore past me in full Rebecca Adlington turbo-prop mode. I almost drowned in her wake. Still, I hung in there and managed a total of 600 meters in 31 minutes. I haven’t checked, but I think that the world record remains unshattered.

Seriously, it felt good to be back in the water. I used to swim quite a bit. I would pop into my local baths early in the morning and was the first one in the pool. Gently ploughing along the lanes in the diving pool, I used to enjoy myself, until one day the lanes were unusually set up in the main pool. Still, I gamely splashed and started inefficiently churning the water as usual.

It was only when I heard the shouts and laughs that I realised my mistake. I finally turned the length (by grabbing the edge and pushing myself off – no tumble turns for me) to see gold medal Olympian and world number one Adrian Moorhouse and the British Olympic team at the far end, waiting to begin their training session.

I thought it was a long slog up that pool. That one Olympic length took forever but, to their credit, the team applauded me all the way to my fingertip touch.

My mum used to tell me how she was taught to swim by gold medallist David Wilkie. My brush with watery greatness was slightly less well received.


© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

[mrsklamc]

Good for you! I have just returned from my Disney cruise and my weight is at an all-time high. It seems 4 meals a day and unlimited soft serve ice cream wasn't good for me. And I can only seem to motivate myself to eat well and exercise for about a week or two.

Do you still have your May trip planned?

 

[sharper_fin]

Oh yes, two weeks today we take that 8 hour flight to WDW

 

[sharper_fin]

Episode Thirty – Keep On Keeping On

Running a mile is a bit like watching a Sylvester Stallone movie. If you can switch your brain off and just go with it, then the time flies by and it can be quite fun. There’s a perverse kind of pleasure to be had from knowing that 200,000 years of human evolution has led to this.

Yet in both cases there are terrible downsides – one leads to pain in the legs and a burning in the lungs as you gasp for oxygen, the other has the Italian Stallion’s terrible acting and slurred delivery – but some believe that both can be worth it if you’re prepared to take the punishment.

Now I’ve seen many Stallone movies before (even the appalling ‘Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot’), but I’d never run a mile in my life. My standard comment on the subject has always been, “miles? They’re the reason that God invented wheels”.

But with my 10km run just four short months away I’ve had to become a bit of a slave to my training plan. Not in an exercise addict kind of way, but more like a ‘if I don’t keep up to speed I’ll let everyone down on the day’ burden of potential guilt. It had to come eventually and one day last week the plan said, ‘Today’s challenge: Run a mile’. I’d seen it coming several days before so I logged onto the net and mapped my route. I had it all planned: warm-up walk from home, turn right at the crossroads and start my shuffling (as slowly as possible) from the final house on the right. Over the motorway bridge, past the church and onto the dirt track. Keep going until, heaving and gasping, I should enter the gloom of the subway where the young couples park up at twilight to enjoy who knows what illicit pleasures – I’m so very glad I ran in the daytime – and burst out into the sunlight like an exhausted but triumphant grey-haired mole. A mole that’s just run a mile.

That was my plan and that’s more or less what I did. Once you get past your teenage years, the number of things that you do for the first time lessen dramatically. Cross the forty year threshold and they dwindle away to virtually nil, but this was a genuine first for me. I’d never really had a need to run that far before, but I’d read enough to know that there’s no trick to it, no arcane technique passed down from father to son. You just put one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other… carry on like this and I could fill today’s 800 words really easily while also effectively illustrating the boredom involved in running any distance. I know that it was only a mile but I feel that I’ve opened a small window into the mental tedium of a marathon runner’s world.

And you know what? Nothing went wrong. There were no juvenile muggers, no comedy moments of doggie-do slippage, no being dive-bombed by overprotective lapwings, nothing. I just kept on going and reached my goal (in this case the subway), did what I was hoping to and let out a little ‘Woo’ of delight. Sadly I didn’t have the spare breath for an accompanying ‘hoo’.

I enjoyed it that much that a few days later I ran two kilometres. That’s only a third of a mile longer but sounds so much more. I heard that there was an indoor athletic championship recently where they ran two kilometres in around five minutes thirty. My time was 15:34, but then again I don’t think that they had to negotiate the dog leavings, hypodermics, condoms and the rusty wheelbarrow hurdle on the back straight, all of which can be found at my local track.

I’m absolutely on track with my training. I’ve now swum a little, run a little, cycled a little. Doing them all individually on different days is plenty enough for me, but in a spooky twist of colliding fates, the company that I work for has just made an announcement. They’re holding a mini-triathlon for employees. 400m swim, 10km bike ride and 2.5km run. All of these distances are now achievable for me, if I play a little fast and loose with the definition of ‘run’.

For half a micro-second I considered it, in the same way that I once considered juggling with swords. I know that I could do it, but there’s just one question that I keep asking myself?

Why on Earth would I?


© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

[DW2DH&DS]

"Why on Earth would I?"

because that would be just way too cool!!!!!

 

[sharper_fin]

THE FAT BLOKE DIARIES

Episode Thirty-One – Catch Me If You Can

I’ve been back to my local running track this week. I pounded the oval and ran my longest distance yet: two and a half kilometres. That sounds so much longer than one and a half miles, don’t you think? Either way, it’s around a quarter of the distance that I’m obliged to travel in September’s Great Yorkshire Run.

And my Beloved came out with me this time too. I left my MP3 player at home, safe in the knowledge that we’d keep each other going. It was lovely to have her with me, and it would have been great to have someone to talk to, if either of us had been able to talk once we got going.

We started off well enough, running the first 300 metres together, but then she felt that I was holding her back – or was it that I couldn’t keep up with her? – and we both settled into our own natural pace. It wasn’t long before she was half a lap in front of me but I knew I’d catch up with her soon enough. She has speed but no stamina.

And so it proved. Pretty soon she slowed to a walk, gasping for breath. My gentle plod wasn’t fast and it certainly wasn’t pretty, but it was eating up the ground between us. I had a vision of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon in my head, with me playing the role of the tortoise. I gradually closed the gap until I could almost reach out and touch her, and then… and then she got her second wind, streaking away into the distance. Well, not streaking exactly, but you know what I mean.

We repeated this pattern several times. She shot off around the track, I fell behind at a steady rhythm until she ran out of steam and walked for a while, allowing me to get nearer and nearer until she took to running again.

I got angrier each time this happened but daren’t increase my pace for fear of burning all my energy. Perhaps I should have taken a pork pie with be to give me a boost halfway? I finally caught up with her at the end of our agreed time as she stood, hands on hips, taking in huge gulps of air and waiting for me to finally finish. That’s when I did ‘the man thing’. I stepped up several gears, slapped a stupid grin on my face and shot past her, high stepping and pumping my arms in full-on sprint mode for another hundred metres. It nearly killed me, but it was so worth it. And I intend to do precisely the same thing over the final hundred metres on The Big Day.

The problem with her being with me but not staying with me was that I had nothing to take my mind off the tedium of running. No Beloved chat and no much loved music meant that I had to resort to listening to the tunes stored in my head.. This would’ve been fine apart from the fact that I had one particular song stuck in there that I couldn’t shift. Yet it was precisely the correct beat to keep my legs pumping consistently. And so it was that I circled my local track while mumbling my own incomparable and incomplete version of Bela Lugosi’s Dead by veteran goth rockers, Bauhaus.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this particular number but I’d be willing to bet that it won’t feature on many runners’ list of inspirational training tracks, and especially there won’t be many runners breathlessly singing their own badly remembered version from 25 years ago. I haven’t even heard it recently, but I do recall that it has a relentless driving drum track and very little else. It’s a sparse, gloomy number that fills much of its nine minutes by simply repeating the title. Or at least my version did as it carried me around the track. There must be other words, but at the time ….

‘Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum-bum… er… Bela Lugosi’s Dead’

You could see how encouraging that would be, I’m sure.

The annoying thing was that my beloved had a list of things that she’d noticed and wanted to discuss on our cool-down walk home: the magpies on the football pitch; the path into the woods that we’ve never seen before; the felled trees all around the edge of the track. I hadn’t spotted any of these but I did know that Bela Lugosi was indeed Dead, and that had been good enough to see me through to the end.

We went home, stayed in with a bottle and put a film on. I saw no irony whatsoever in watching Run Fatboy Run with an icepack on my knee.


© 2009 Shaun Finnie

 

[DW2DH&DS]

Bauhaus??? wooooowwwww!!!! haven't heard them in a while. i use to listen to love and rockets all the time and peter murphy solo. seen the latter two in concert. high school days. am i dating myself? i'll be 38 on sunday!!!!!

 

[sharper_fin]

THE FAT BLOKE DIARIES

Episode Thirty-Two - Flying High Again

I'm not here. While you're reading this I'm sunning myself in Orlando, Florida. Fantastic. It's going to be hugely enjoyable, I'm certain of that, but restful? I doubt it.

I've kept rigidly to my training plan so far in my quest to be ready for the 10km run I've foolishly promised to do in September, but this is my first dose of real temptation. This is a choice between full-on family fun in the home of Mr and Ms Mouse - if Mickey and Minnie never married, isn't it a coincidence that they share the same surname? - and keeping up to date with my training (which would defeat the object of having a holiday) in the energy-sapping ninety degree heat. That's how hot it's going to be in old money, I've no idea what these newfangled centigrade thermometers would call it apart from 'scorchio!'

So that's the quandary that faces me. But I know what I have to do; I've packed my running shoes.

While I'm away I'll be setting myself two challenges. Firstly, to ride The Hulk roller-coaster once again (see FBD 9 - Reasonings for the whole embarrassing saga), and secondly, to do an early morning run at least twice a week. I hope I can manage those. I'll be walking somewhere in the region of ten miles a day in the theme parks, so even if I don't do anything else, I shouldn't come back a total lard-****. The amount of walking should counteract the weight gain that's pretty much expected when a European enters an American buffet diner. It's like accidentally setting the liposuction machine on 'blow'.

My hotel has a one and a half mile running loop around its lake. I may try that, though the seventh coaster of the day might be enough in itself to get my heart rate up to high intensity. A friend who is going with us has suggested that he could hire a bike and cycle alongside me as I run. He also had the 'hilarious' idea that he could get a megaphone and encourage me to keep my knees up, or maybe just sing the 'Rocky' theme at me. I non-too politely replied that if he tried anything like that then he and his bike would be in the lake faster than he could yell 'Adrienne!'. And Florida is justifiably famous for its gators.

Hopefully my running over in the States will be as surprisingly successful as my last training run at home, when I found myself wide awake at 5:30 on a Saturday morning. I quickly realised that sleep wouldn't be returning any time soon so did what any sensible fat bloke would never consider doing; I crept quietly out of the house like a remorseful lover who's woken up in the least appropriate bed ever. I didn't even start randomly pressing my watch looking for the stopwatch setting (sorry, I mean the chronometer setting - I'm posh, at least for Barnsley) until I was well into my warm-up walk, for fear of the beeping buttons waking my Beloved. She slept on, but as the sun reluctantly rose over Rotherham I ventured out into the solitude of beautiful spring dawn and slowly I began to run.

The early morning mists over the fields had never looked so refreshing, the birds in the woods had never sung clearer and I had never rejoiced in the simple pleasure of running so much in my life. Even the hilly sections were, if not enjoyable or easy, at least manageable at a gentle trot.

I had expected to run for twenty minutes or so, possibly covering around one and a half miles. I told you I was slow. I'm slow in the way that those guys are in Chariots of Fire, but without the need for film speed manipulation. When I finally returned to my garden gate I glanced at my watch: precisely thirty minutes of steady unbroken running had passed. Later on a quick check of my favourite mapping website confirmed that my distance had been much more than I'd expected too. I fully appreciate that there's a long way to go, but I've never really believed before that I could run two and a half miles without a break.

I've always known that we can do amazing things if only we put our mind to it, but this was exactly the opposite. I'd done something which was totally amazing to me, and mostly because I'd left my mind out of it and simply enjoyed the experience.

Now I'm really looking forwards to that path around the lake.


© 2009 Shaun Finnie