Wow! Is this what a really good run is like?
I set out by pressing the app’s neutral smiley (hedging my bets, aware that some have found the additional 3 minutes tough, and thinking: better it turns out better than I thought it would be than a disappointment.... Hhmm 🤔 ok, I’m still working on that.. the key observation being that I didn’t choose the downbeat options).
I had a multi-pronged approach in my vision for this run:
- Steve Hobbs’ mindful running podcast, set so that I could finish scanning my body by the end of the run (I started it in the last session - not the ideal way of going about this, of course).
- What I’d heard about the ‘awe-walk’ research on Claudia Hammond’s All in the Mind. (Spoiler: Improves mood. Radically transforms selfies.) Why not, I figured, rescale it to an ‘awe-run’? After all, it’s only the difference between one foot or two feet being off the ground. 🌳 ☀️ 🌊 This much I now know.
- A newly downloaded Runkeeper. I’m curious 🧐 about how far we’re actually covering in distance. No pressure, no fixation on ‘5k’ or speed or pace... just thought it might be useful to track and know when to upgrade the shoes. Googling ‘how far do I run in 20/25/28/30 minutes’ just wasn’t cutting it. (Obvs.)
As we were double-knotting our laces, fresh from our respective ‘desks’, Mr - who had clearly been focused on things other than work - started venting about the election debacle 🇺🇸 . So I forgot to start Runkeeper. End of Prong 3. By the end of warm-up, we’d also covered the latest dramas of ManU. Now, this means Mr is well and truly wound-up. And sharing it. Not much karma in the air as Laura gave the instruction to start 🏃🏼♀️ 🏃♂️. Prongs 1 and 2 were already looking like lost causes.
And yet, the run went so well. I barely noticed it. Cripes, is that even good? Was I more mindless than mindful? I was following Steve Hobbs. In fact - as I’m the only one with a functioning phone and earphones - I was channeling him (as I do Laura) to Mr. Now, I have come to realise, this is different to just listening to the podcast. I have to become the podcast. Not totally mindless, then. Somebody else’s mind. I repeated the sections on feet, arms, and head - now relaying everything to Mr. He seemed to be listening.
New for me today, Steve talked us through the ‘hip’ section. Lift from the hips not the head, he advised. (That simple revisualisation, I venture, was to be critical.) Watch out for tendencies for the alternating sides of the hip to sink down or drag back. It gives a lighter footfall, apparently. Stops the drain of energy. He talked about his own problems. His old football injury (Mr’s ears noticeably pricked up). This then got me thinking (my own mind having returned): Is this the ‘gazelle’ thing I keep hearing about? And the big conundrum: can a tortoise be a gazelle (at the same time)? Can you gazelle at a slow pace?? And then Laura piped up: ‘5 mins’. Where had time and distance gone? Amazing. Perhaps even gazelling?
In the final stage, Steve turned our attention to our surroundings. I then realised I’d completely forgotten to do ‘awe’, but Steve was closing his podcast with something similar, so Prong 2 was saved. I marvelled at his descriptions of springtime conditions from lockdown 1, and my own autumnal echoes; the two moments being just a few miles apart.
‘I think I’m doing really well at this running’, Mr remarked, as we stretched out hamstrings in the kitchen.
Running belt recommendations please?
W8R2 without Laura
Taken on too much?!?!? 
W8R1 - where has the air gone!! Way too hot even at 9pm
