Back in the Game!

Weeks to go: 7
Current weight: 15 stone 1 pound (ooh, creeping down again, get in!)
Total lost so far: 15 pounds (techically back to halfway again)
...so let's get the running going again, shall we?

Well, not quite, but at least some kind of athletic adventure was undertaken at the weekend. Those of you paying attention (do keep up, please) will see that this past Sunday was the Kingswood Mountain Bike Duathlon run by the nice people at Ashford Triathlon Club. For the uninitiated, this involved 3km of trail running, 14km of mountain biking and then the same 3km trail run again. All in the brisk morning light of a March morning. And all done in 1 hour and 33 minutes. 72nd out of 122 - okay, so not world record breaking, but bear in mind that I haven't done much in the way of training over the last 3 weeks due to injury, so I'm happy enough.

Looking forward; my lack of half-marathon race in the build up to the big one at the London Marathon I'll be changing tack and doing the Paddock Wood Half Marathon on April 5th. And with that, I'll need something to distract me from the possibility of returning injuries and pain.

Something I've used for quite a while is music while I run. One of the most distracting things I used to hate when I ran without it was the sound of my own breathing. If I run at any pace at all, my big mouth makes a fair racket and as such, I always seemed to convince myself I was more tired than I really was. So the 'generic white MP3 player' is a great choice to mask the hurricane-like sounds of my gob and helps me concentrate on the run at hand; be it an easy jog or a fair paced aerobic threshold workout.

Research shows that the rhythm of the music you listen to as you run correlates closely with your footfall and therfore the pace at which you run. Obviously, my giant limbs rotate at a different pace to a tiny 7 stone woman, but you get the picture. Therefore, things like slower beats are better for the more leisurely plods and Hardcore Dutch Gabba is best saved for the lungbusting interval training sessions!

Me, I'm more a fan of the anthemic rock and indie, probably because of it's impression on me during my teenage years. Stand up those of you with any songs from the first Oasis album or Shed Seven on your running playlists! Unfortunately, most of that stuff is archived on tapes in the loft and not exactly transferable (for me anyway) onto the little white music box. But luckily, Kings of Leon are perfect, that and Bloc Party, The Fratellis, Feeder, Lostprophets, Pigeon Detectives. But to each their own.

On that musical interlude: Happy return-to-running! Same bat-time, same bat-channel next week, team.