A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct

An actual gym bunny yesterday
Source: https://opensea.io/assets/0x61bd6b10c7bf3e548f8659d016079e099510a4dc/13

I was never sporty at school. We were made to play football and cricket that I wasn't that good at. We played rugby as well, which I wasn't too bad at, being quite quick and nimble, but as an adult I stopped growing at 5ft 3, so I was never going to set the rugby world alight on the pitch. I quite liked tennis and badminton that we were allowed to try in later years, but not really encouraged to follow it up, or maybe you were if you were good enough to represent the school. Anyway, that's not important. I mean, I could have been the world's best polo player for all I know, but we there wasn't a great selection of sports on offer at the time, and, as my parents were never into anything more active than the odd heated argument, there was no impetus for extra-curricular sports in my house either. After I finished school I bought a bike (with my own money! Thank you North Pier Sea Chef restaurant for my first official job over summer after finishing secondary school. You were a glorified fish and chip shop run by a bunch of utter twats, but you gave me my first wheels) that I rode to college and pretty much anywhere, as well as the odd leisure ride. I got into aerobics when I was a post-grad at university and loved it. From then on in my fitness activities were based around cycling (as I also discovered mountain biking when I was a post-grad at university) or aerobics. Moving on and getting old, I've continued with the gym classes of various types while cycling has ebbed and flowed. More recently, our son came home which curtailed my gym classes for a while, but they came back with a vengeance and even now this is my mode of exercise of choice. So where does running fit into this?

I never really got into running. I'd been out for a run on odd occasions, but it never really grabbed me until recently, but I'll get onto that in another post. I'm a gym bunny. None of that macho lifting heavy things and putting them down bollocks, though. My chosen mode of exercise is donning some Lycra and doing dancey aerobics, Step, Boxercise, Body Pump, HIIT, even Street Dance. I've done them all. Even during the lockdown I've been doing lots of Les Mills Body Combat at home using Les Mills On Demand. I love this sort of thing. It's like aerobics, but instead of mambo-cha-cha-chas, you're visualising kicking someone's arsehole up through their chest and out through their mouth. As you might imagine, this is incredibly cathartic and great for letting off steam after a frustrating day at work. Of course, being of a more gym bunny persuasion, I'm usually working out inside and don't have to worry about rain or wind or the cold, my biggest sportswear concern being if my leggings match my top. Fresh air isn't a pre-requisite for me. Even in summer, I don't mind the heat of working out in a warm room. In fact I've done aerobics outdoors in hot places like Crete, Bulgaria and even tropical Cambodia when I've been on holiday and love the attritional feeling of leaving a Dead Sea sized puddle of sweat in my wake. On the other hand, getting outside in freezing January to go running, when it's pitch black, sleeting and icy is really not my idea of a good time, normally. Saying that, and as I'll cover in a later update, once I've got out and started running I actually quite enjoy it (even more so when I get home and kick back in a post-exercise blissed-out endorphin fug). The problem I have is dragging myself up the entropy slope of half-arsedness to get out, plug in my headphones, start Strava on my phone and just run. 

Aerobics in Battambang, Cambodia.
Guess which one is me (hint: I'm the white, ginger male in shorts who looks like me)

Therefore the reason for this blog is I want to do more running, so I guess this is going to be about how to start forming the habits of running on a regular basis now that the weather is becoming more conducive to running. I'll probably post crap about all aspects of running (and fitness in general), from kit, performance measurement and whatever else takes me fancy as well as post some gratuitous pics and selfies taken when I've been trotting about.

So what have I done this week?

Runs 

Ready to go on a long run

Friday: 4.9 km run (223 kcal, Shoes: Asics Road Hawks)

Sunday: 12.83 km run (1016 kcal: Shoes: New Balance WT410v6)

Post industrial semi-rural West Yorkshire

Wednesday: 6.22 km run (494 kcal)

Runs powered, as always, by Tikiboo and also this Hip-Hop opus from my favourite running playlist which is great to spit out lyrics to as you run, but avoid saying the "N"-word if you're running past people. Unfortunately this is the censored version, but you get the idea.

Get your ass up and hurra
You Can Do It by Ice Cube

Other stuff
Saturday: Body Combat (Release 77, 45 mins, 368 kcal)

Monday: Body Combat (release 85 for the first time, 60 minutes, 386 kcal)

Tuesday: Body Combat (release 78, 45 minutes, 377 kcal)

Thursday: Rest day

A jumping knee from Body Combat

Finally, extra marks for getting the origin of the post title. Answer next time