Having made the move to York, one of the things on my list of things to do was to get out running again. York’s the ideal place to do it – it’s about as flat as it’s possible to get without being non-stick, and being on the riverside there are some excellent routes practically on the doorstep. The weather’s been good as well, so there’s really not a lot of excuses.
I also decided that I was going to start club running again, which is something that I haven’t done for a very (very) long time. For some reason I’m hopeless at maintaining a steady pace on my own – I tend to speed up until I’m going ever-so-slightly faster than I’m comfortable with, and end up feeling completely shagged out at the end of it. At least when you’re running with people, there’s a pace that you can nail yourself to, which makes the whole process that much more successful as far as I’m concerned.
I went out with the second of the clubs that Google found for me on Tuesday, and ended up in a fast group. It wasn’t what I’d planned particularly, but when you don’t know anyone it’s difficult to know what someone’s idea of ‘fast’ is, relative to yours – for all I knew, they could be capable of leaving Paula Radcliffe in the dust. The group I started out with was reasonably large, so it didn’t seem like a problem – although with a fractionally-quicker pace it could have been. Because I was in the middle, there was at least the possibility of dropping back to the slower end of the line – until I looked around after about twenty minutes to realise that I was the slower end – there was noone in sight behind.
And it’s a powerful incentive to keep up, when you find yourself twenty minutes out from a club that you’ve only the sketchiest idea of it’s location, and you’ve spent the last twenty minutes concentrating on maintaining the pace of the group and not crashing into trees rather than logging the lefts and the rights and mentally reversing them so you could get home if you needed to. Basically, I didn’t have the slightest idea of where I was, so falling behind was going to be a bad idea if I ever wanted to see my wife and family again (OK, slight exaggeration, but there are some disconcertingly dark bits of York.)
All of which meant that I ended up going further and faster than I would have normally intended to – and just goes to show how I wouldn’t have gone as far and as fast if I’d made a deliberate choice about who and where and how fast to go. But it was actually a bloody good run all the same, made all the better for knowing that I really shouldn’t have been able to keep up the pace given the amount of effort I’ve put in up to now. Maybe I’m in better shape than I thought…
