It’s lucky, really, that I am not too sensitive or the last three weeks might have finished me off.

I can cope with only running a 14 minute mile. I can understand that my hips and knees hurt with the effort of lugging my huge frame along. I kind of get that my heart rate goes higher than the others I run with because of how unfit I am. I do…honestly, I get it and it's not quite enough to put me off of doing it. Everyone has to start somewhere, don't they?

Only, well… I had a nasty run out yesterday that has made me a bit concerned that I’m really really not getting any fitter at all. In fact, if it is possible, I’m pretty sure that this is getting harder, not easier. Is it possible to jog oneself into obesity?

I have, I will concede, made the following improvements over the last 3 weeks:
1) I am rosy, rather than puce/blue when I’ve finished
2) I can do 3 minutes running and one walking, rather than 2 running and 1 walking
3) I can do nearly three miles, rather than less than two. Actually, two feels quite short now.
4) I can wheeze out the odd word to my fellow runners even during the worst bits.

That completes the things that are better. Now for the much longer ‘things that are shit’ list:
1) I was supposed to run 4 miles yesterday and I couldn’t
2) I had to put on a special burst of speed to overtake a bloke walking (walking!) in front of me.
3) I got overtaken by a jogging group.
4) My left ankle is so sore tthat I had to abandon yesterday’s run and walk home, and now I have to go to the bloody physio next week
5) Apparently my shoes are ‘all wrong’. They’re Nike rinning shoes – how wrong can they be?
6) I have to wear an extremely uncomfortable ‘level 4’ support bra, which resembles nothing so much as an old fashioned corset. Ditto the knickers which stop my poor traumatised child bearing stomach wobbling so alarmingly that passers by are injured. ‘Corsetty’ is the only word I can think of.
7) At what point am I going to be in the middle of a run and think ‘cor blimey, luv a duck this is brilliant this is’…? Rather than, for example ‘Who am I kidding? I hate this, I hate running, it hurts and it’s boring and it hurts and I’m knackered and bored and it hurts and I think I’m actually getting worse….’, which was pretty much all that echoed round my head for the entire 45 minutes I was out the other day.