So I’ve basically cracked wobbling along slowly for 4 miles. I am confident I can do that with only a couple of walking breaks and at the end of it I’ll be able to have a reasonably normal day.

With that in mind, Evil Bob announced we would be doing some ‘hill work’ today.

I’m not, as I think I’ve mentioned here before, terribly keen on hills. In fact, it would be fair to say I regard them as a sort of natural enemy to my *mumble mumble* stone frame.

In short, the words ‘Me’, Hills’ and ‘Running’ are not a threesome I would naturally want any part of.

Lovely Tori cried off today’s run, pleading that she had already done some ludicrous dawn dash round her local bike track this morning (hmm) so Evil Bob was free to victimise me with no witnesses.

We opened our jaunt with a 6 minute uphill section. I’m sure you are thinking ‘6 minutes? That’s not long…’ but let me assure you, it’s a very long time to be running gently uphill. Then we turned left onto the “proper” hill

‘Come on’, he jollied me, while my legs screamed in horror at the camber, ‘just get to the top and we’ll rest’.

‘I caaaaaaaan’t’ I wailed, like a toddler.

It was not my most dignified hour.

In childish retaliation for Evil Bob’s announcement that we would be doing hill work, I’d taken my iPod along for the run. In true English fashion though, I couldn’t quite bring myself to be that rude at the start of the run so I’d settled for putting only one earphone in. After the first ‘proper’ hill I defiantly stuffed the other earphone in too and turned it up until I couldn’t hear Evil Bob being all motivating.

I pondered what could motivate me to run a bit harder and further and so on. I concluded that someone waving a pair of nice shoes at me from the finish line might do it. Then I realised that wouldn’t work because I’d be too many miles away from them at the start to see the shoes. It is a mark of the oxygen deprivation that must have been in play by that point that I decided that I needed the shoes attached to one of those donkey/carrot stick arrangements. You know like in cartoons when they strap the stick with the carrot on to the back of the donkey’s head?

Eee-haw