A blog in which I apparently make the case that I won at the Bupa London 10,000

As you get older you generally spend large portions of your day doing things you know how to do. At work I do things I am either double-plus-good-at, or can speak about using enough fancy-sounding acronyms to confuse people into thinking I am good at them.

So deciding to do a proper run (the Bupa London 10,000) was a bit of a shock to the system really. Because I am relatively bad at running. That is, relative to anyone else who has ever tried to run... and probably some people who have not. At school I was in the top set for Maths, Science, English... but in sport I was so bad that I was relegated to hockey, and as a result I didn't do much running after I finished education.

When I go out for a run, my brain tries to convince me it would be a good idea to stop, sit down and eat a biscuit.

Things that shut it up

1. Training, not trains

When you are going to do a run, you should apparently train for it. Confusingly, this doesn’t mean you catch a train instead of doing the run, it means you run instead of catching the train. I bullied myself into running by hiding running in my day (much like your Mum used to do with vegetables in lasagne). I can’t stand all the time that’s consumed by making a run an event in its own right, so I chopped down this time by running home from work, or part of the way. That way, I would only get home twenty minutes or so later, but fit in a 50 minute run, and then I could get on with my busy evening of sitting and biscuit eating.

2. The best things have a soundtrack

There is nothing, as far as I am concerned, as energising as a good song. I promise. Lucozade just haven’t figured out how to squish them into the bottles, but as soon as Willy Wonka starts making drinks that play your favourite song in your head, I’ll be the spoilt kid swigging them down before they’re through testing. Create a playlist of songs that make you smile and make you dance and instead of flagging at the third mile you’ll be half running, half dancing, laughing about a fun night out with your friends. It will divert your mind away from thinking crafty little things like ‘er, you could just, stop, you know?’ and trick you into having actual fun. Music is good at outwitting you.

3. Charity 

There are a lot of things that humanity is collectively responsible for which completely suck. Seriously. But equally there are some things we are actually awesome at. One of those things, in my opinion, is supporting our friends and their exercise goals by donating to worthwhile causes. Knowing that people had parted with their hard earned cash at my instruction and offered it up to help people with dementia meant I'd be pretty rubbish if I just stopped running. So I didn't.

4. Winning

Exercise can seriously take your sh*t. Seriously. You can bitch and whine about it. You can ignore it for a few days. You can begrudgingly acknowledge it for an hour before heading to the pub with your mates. But as long as you have some sort of relationship with it, however bad you might be, it does you good.

And really, if you incorporate exercise into your daily routine; have fun while you’re doing it; raise a load of money for a worthwhile cause and do yourself buckets of good, then you’re winning. Not at an actual race (where you come 10,317th), but at life.