Saturday
25th August
Distance:9:74miles
Time:2:23:02Avg Speed:3:99mph
Avg Pace:15:43min/mile
Calories burned:1218
Run
Today
I again begin my missive with the appeal that I usually place at the end. I do
this to bring to the forefront, dear reader my reasons for writing as the date
of the Great North Run, which I am training for gets closer with every passing
day. I am running to raise funds for The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign and I
write to bring awareness to the cause of Muscular Dystrophy and if any of you
good blog readers out there want to sponsor me in my endeavours you can follow
my link to the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, its work, outreach, campaigns and
research. Just log on to www.muscular-dystrophy.org
and see why I am doing
this. If
you feel you want to support me with a donation then please log onto my ‘Just
Giving’ account and give as much as you can. www.justgiving.com/Team-LewisMDC.
A huge thank you to all of you who have donated already and to those of you
who have not sponsored me yet …. WHY NOT???? Come on guys I –we-they need your
support.
Ok
so when I left you last I had had a couple of bad runs with legs that really
did not want to work. What to do? I pondered. The action was simple I would
apply the great Kenyan runners strategy and sleep!! Now those of you regular
readers who read via my Facebook status links will know that I am not prone to
early bed times and can often be found trawling the murky depths of the
internet at ungodly hours of the night. I am one of those people who can get by
on minimum hours sleep, however I do enjoy a siesta and often curl up mid-day
for a nap, I have even nodded off in class before today only to wake from my
all too brief reverie to find a startled pupil standing before me with a page
of sums to be marked, and a quizzical expression on their face! None the less
being the dedicated person that I am, having decided upon a course of action,
to wit that I would have a rest week, I threw myself into it with gusto. Not
sure if gusto is the best word to describe a week of catnapping and dozing that
would have given any narcoleptic a good run for their money! Conversely, doze I
did. I took every opportunity to rest my legs and decided that I would not run
at all from Saturday to Saturday. I embarked upon a week of very little and
decided that I would catch up on a bit of reading.
Having
chosen a week of literature unfortunately the book I chose to read first was
one that I had been avoiding for ages and one that I find it hard to equate
with the term ‘literature’. I
suspected I would not like it and I didn’t. Yes you’ve guessed it I caved and
read 50 Shades of Grey. I felt that I had to read it in order to comment as
being quite an opinionated person … “no not
you, opinionated surely not!” I hear you cry. Yet as it is such a hot topic
with the very definite love it versus loath it campaign I wanted to know what
all the fuss was about and would I fall for this mythical Christian Grey? Well
dear reader in the battle of the love it v loath it I fell most assuredly into
the latter. I found myself reading just so I could finish it and file it with
the other ‘well I shan’t be reading that again’ books. I pride myself on
finishing any book I start no matter how bad, having only given up on one book
in recent years, I ploughed on to the end spurred on by my inner goddess to get
this crap filed away asap and oh my I
got to the end quickly and with the feeling of relief that I would not be
wasting any more of my sleeping time on such a poorly written, badly
constructed, limited yet verbose, effusive pile of horse doo-doo!
Christian
Grey is a horrible controlling freak who the writer attempts to sugar coat in
descriptions of his outward beauty and his ability to wear a pair of trousers
well! I have to say that whilst reading it my inner goddess filed her nails and
did a Sudoku puzzle as my sub conscious yelled at me in her ‘mercurial’ way ‘I warned you, I told
you so, I know you, you will not like this.’ I need my literature to put me there, to feel
the character, to be the character, to love the character, to cry with the
character, to laugh with the character and of course to share the characters
apogee. Yet this book left me sad that so many can find this man anything other
than a creep. If his name was Kyle and he was an unemployed Chav then he would
have been demonised and put on an ASBO. By making him mega rich and dwelling
(over dwelling) on his physical appearance, his clothes and his smell.. of body
wash - yeah I got that he smelt of body wash you don’t need to rewrite it every
time you mention him- the writer ( I don’t use the term author for a reason as
that would imply someone who writes books!) tries and tries and tries to make
him appealing. Well not to me I hated him with every fibre of my being. I
particularly hated the scene where he turns up, stalkeresque, while she is
visiting her mother and the mother comments that he must love her because he
dropped everything to travel to where she was. NOOOOOO obviously the mother is
as vacuous and inane as the daughter. ANNND as for that whimpering, simpering
female Anastasia, oh don’t get me started. She is an anti-heroine who just from
start to end annoyed and irked me so much that I wanted to slap her face and
yell at her.
Yes
dear reader I hated that book and I will not be reading the other two
thankfully I did not pay good money for it a BGF loaned it to me with the
endorsement ‘It is the biggest pile of poo that I have read.’ I am amused to
note that a lot of my Facebook friends who I went to school with feel the same
and as a consequence I find myself thinking of my dear old literature teacher,
the fabulous Miss Brent, of my old Alma Mater, Abbey Grange. I realise how
influential she was on my reading choices and the way I view characters. She
taught me how to look deep into the words and see beyond the pages, she also
had an extremely driven sexual literature desire which causes me to wonder
about how she would view the 50 Shades books. You can bet your sweet ass that
had it come out in 1977 she would have made us read it; she was the Jean Brodie
of old ‘Scabby Abbey’.
Another
literature teacher I had at my middle school was the quiet, bookish Mrs Cripps
who engendered in me a need to see written words as powerful and rich in
meaning, she made a class of 12 year olds read Shakespeare and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and write deep
political analysis. Still to this day I remember my opening sentence of that
essay ‘Animal Farm is a biting satire
upon dictatorship….’ Of course I cannot mention teachers who had an
impact on me without paying respect to the first teacher who stirred in me a love
of books the sweet and gentle Mrs Backhouse who read Beatrix Potter and Enid
Blyton to the 6 year old me. A teacher so warm and loving that I still 44 years
later send her a Christmas card every year and she to me. Mrs Backhouse, Mrs Cripps, Miss Brent I thank you for your passion
and for teaching me how to truly read a book beyond the surface.
So
after all that literature annoyance and a week of rest how did my legs last out
on my next run? The answer to that is brilliant. I set off on my usual route
and contemplated how things would feel. A mile in I realised that my GPS was
not working and had only record one mile as 0.04 of a mile so I was not best
chuffed to say the least. The GPS continued to be irksome for at least another
mile and a half until eventually it sparked into full action. By this time I
was running on legs that felt stronger than they have in a long time and
although the weather conditions were poor, low smog that at points precluded
vision of more than 20m, I plodded on.
I
had an interesting encounter with a black Labrador who whilst on his morning
walk in Adel took a dislike to my running and launched himself at me with teeth
bared I had to check that he had not broken the skin as I had felt this teeth make
contact. Fortunately I was only bruised, his owner made a feeble apology and I was too into my run to stand and have a
go at him for having a dangerous dog, thankfully on the lead, can’t imagine
what would have happened had it not been!
Since
starting this running endeavour I have had it in the back of my mind that
before the day of the Great North run I would run to Otley (a nearby market
town) as a foretaste to the main event. Otley is about 10 miles away. I have
done ‘there and back runs’ that have equalled 9-10 miles but never done a
straight 9-10 mile run. As I ran on past 3,4,5 miles I felt my confidence
growing and decide that today was the day I would go for it. At about the 5
mile stage I rang my Raison D’etre, waking him from his slumbers, and announced
that I was on my way to Otley and would meet him at the auction mart in about 1
hour. I said 1 hour as I calculated that I had 4 miles to do and I generally
move at about 12 minutes to the mile, I also built in a ‘tiredness’ factor so 1
hour seemed reasonable. 40 minutes later I arrived at the specified meeting
place on legs that were fit to go much further and a feeling of glowing pride
and self-congratulation. Now my Raison D’etre is a man. A man of literal
interpretations and as I stood there by the meat market (romantic I know) I
began to realise that if I said an hour then an hour is what he would take and
that I was in danger of catching a chill at the very least as the rigours of
running do tend to make one perspire! So here I was with muscles that were
aching to do more but standing wreathed in their own ‘glow’ so I did the only
thing I could to preserve myself I started on the journey home as I figured
that I would pass him on the way. Now unbeknownst to me he had decided that he
would come the back way into Otley so as not to pass me on the way and put me
off (Yeah Christian Grey that’s what a real man does and how a good man
thinks!) he had also prepared a recovery pack of hot tea and blankets. Have I
ever mentioned just how much I love this amazing man? So after about half a
mile I called him again to see how far away he was only to find he was now
waiting at the meeting point having arrived there on the dot of one hour as
arranged. Minutes later he pulled alongside me wrapped me in a blanket an
apologised for not having had enough time to line it with tin foil, handed me a
cup of tea and drove me home.
I
was so proud of myself for having met one of my pre-race targets, for having
run well and for setting my mind to ‘go’ for the big day. Yet more than that I
felt so loved by this wonderful man who on the way home spoke of his pride in
me, his desire to prepare my recovery pack but mostly his wish that he could
run! My eyes well with tears as I write this now, he is a wonderful, intelligent, kind,
gentle, thoughtful, funny and handsome man who I love more than life itself. He
does not deserve this condition (no one does) but have it he has and for him I
will run. For him I will run. For him I will run. For him I beg of you please
sponsor me and help raise money for the charity that works so tirelessly to
raise awareness, to raise funds, to sponsor research, to support sufferers, to
be there for people like my Raison D’etre. Just log on to www.muscular-dystrophy.org and see why I am doing this. If you feel
you want to support me with a donation then please log onto my ‘Just Giving’
account and give as much as you can.
www.justgiving.com/Team-LewisMDC.
A huge thank you to all of you who have donated already and to those of you
who have not sponsored me yet …. WHY NOT???? Come on guys I –we-they need your
support.
Thank you for
your support
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