They like to tell you about the nipple rash and losing your toenails, but marathon veterans never tell you about the boredom, the vertebrae-crunching tedium of slogging your (no, you're not stupid enough) my sorry white ass around the conveniently-placed green spaces of South West London.
I'm six and half weeks away from the Big Day, and want to regale you with stories of Personal Bests and fartlek sessions, but all I can think about, talk about, is my gut. My fat, fat gut. God, I'm fat. I know I'm fat because I caught myself in the reflection of a shop window towards the end of a desperate seven-miler yesterday morning and saw a pathetic, chunky wheeze-monkey, not so much running as perpetually falling forward like some Breughel peasant being prodded in the back by a bored minor demon in an unglamorous cul de sac in the suburbs of Hell.
I wear a Buff, a multi-purpose bandana-type affair, which keeps my bald head warm at the beginning of the run and sucks up the sweat at the end. I also wear sunglasses with yellow lenses, which make my world a lot brighter in the dull mornings, and a yellow cycling jacket which, with the aforementioned bandana, make me look like an clapped out Ali G impersonator. Eric Liddell, I ain't.
And it all started so well. I got a training programme back in November from a mate who does really crazy stuff (ultra marathons, dragging sleds across the Arctic tundra ect) and stuck to it. Thirty minute jogs became forty; Sunday long runs crept up to hour. I began to take a certain fetishitic pleasure in queuing up the iPhone with my motivational playlist (Don't Stop Believin'/Journey, Back to my Roots/Richie Havens) and setting the stopwatch on my Christmas prezzie running watch before heading out into the frosty January mornings.
I ran ten miles without stopping, which felt like an anointing into the Knights Templar of Physical Endeavour. I joined two mates and ran the Putney towpath, like, well, runners do.
Then it all turned to shit. An ankle niggle troubled me enough to see a Sports physio, who took me apart and cautioned against doing any more. Instability in my personal life (not now, but maybe another time) kept me under the duvet and February was all too soon pissed up a wall.
My entries on iMapMyRun.com dwindled; my averages plummeted; I got fat.
A hastily booked week's skiing in Italy (see Instability in Personal Life, above) didn't help, allowing me to justify the three course breakfasts and triple cake teas by the lactic burn in my thighs. Michael Phelps didn't need the calories I was sinking, but hey, I'm on holiday.
By my front door there now rests four bags of quinoa, a bag of lentils and a bag of sunflower seeds. Between them, they weigh twelve pounds. I have six weeks to get twelve pounds off my blobby gut and the twelve-pound Whole Foods display back into the cupboard. Just looking at them wires my jaw.
Tomorrow, I head out for a leisurely six-miler before the Hastings Half-Marathon on Sunday. All I hope is that my lungs open up enough so I can run most of it, rather than walk the first two miles with my shoulders up by my ears wheezing like an old git. Who's stupid, stupid idea was this?
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