1470: Move

Well, I did it; a little later than intended due to an all-round shitty week last week, but did it nonetheless: I got up early and battled through my own sense of inadequacy to have a very slow run, kicking off yet another attempt at the Couch to 5K program.

My trouble with getting up, out and exercising at the moment is the fear that it’s going to be difficult and painful. The rational response to this is “well, of course it is” but the irrational side of me uses that as a reason to want to put it off. I’m not sure why, though, because putting it off for longer is just going to make it more difficult and painful in the long run, which will just make me feel worse, which is ultimately somewhat counter-productive, to say the least.

What I’ve found I need to do in the past is try not to worry about what other people think of me, and try not to compare myself to others. I am woefully unfit and rather overweight, so of course I’m not going to be able to run as well as that guy with the frighteningly muscular legs who just overtook me. It’s hard not to compare and want to push yourself, though — but in my current physical condition, pushing myself too hard just makes me want to stop completely which, again, is ultimately somewhat counter-productive.

What I generally try to do is to blot out the outside world as much as possible. When it’s crappy weather like this, I put on my hoodie and put the hood up, and put some loud music on to encourage me to give it my best. Today I had on my “Gym Battles” playlist from the last time I had a half-hearted fitness drive, which includes a selection of anime themes plus battle music from a variety of RPGs — all of which make fantastic exercise music, I might add. The soundtrack to Split/Second also makes for brilliant running music, so I can highly recommend that if you have a copy.

Now I’m back and about to have breakfast, and my legs are aching. I’m sure they’re going to hurt even more later and tomorrow, but that’s an oddly satisfying feeling — it’s physical evidence that you’ve worked hard and done something positive. So long as it doesn’t continue aching for too long, that is!

I’m going to try and support the occasional running with some Wii Fit. I don’t want to set myself too ambitious goals so I get disheartened and don’t stick to them, but at the same time I also don’t want to waste my time. I’ll have to experiment a bit and see what works for me in the long run.

For now let’s hope I can keep this up for a while at least.

#oneaday Day 903: Running Review

I’ve been running through the Couch to 5K programme again, no pun intended. If you’re unfamiliar with this well-paced running programme, check out the image at the end of this post for more information. Also, play through Emi’s path on Katawa Shoujo and you’ll really want to do it.

Ahem. Anyway. Tonight was the first day of my fourth week on the programme. I’ve done it through to completion once previously, but that was quite a while ago now and my fitness has lapsed somewhat, so I decided to start again. Week 4 is where the pace starts to step up a bit and the jumps in difficulty begin to become more noticeable. For example, tonight I did two three-minute runs and two five-minute runs; on the previous trip out, I did two minute-and-a-half runs and two three-minute runs.

I got on pretty well. I didn’t have to stop at all, and I paced myself well. Said pace is still fairly glacial compared to people who aren’t carrying around as much weight as I am, but I’m satisfied so far.

One thing I remember noticing last time I did all this and am noticing again now is the fact that running is good stress relief. It’s actually probably exercise in general, but I’m finding it particularly apparent while running.

When I say “stress relief” I don’t necessarily mean “making the stress go away”. If it was possible to just make stress dissipate… well, then the world would be a much nicer place. (I also don’t mean “stress relief” in the same way that J-List refers to “stress relief toys”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry.)

No, what I mean, in fact, is that running seems to “shake things loose” in my head. Stressful thoughts which have been clogging up my head all day come to the fore, particularly when reaching the end of a session. This isn’t always a massively pleasant experience, but it can be helpful and cathartic in the long run. It’s easy for stressful thoughts to get “backed up” and simply cause you to “feel stressed” all day for no specific reason — releasing these thoughts helps dissipate that vague “meh” feeling, though naturally you still have the specific thoughts themselves to deal with.

The human brain is weird.

Anyway, I’m happy with my progress on Couch to 5K so far. I remember being impressed with myself when I made it through the last time I did so, and being even more impressed when I successfully made it through an entire 10K race in London. (Okay, again I wasn’t especially quick, but at least I didn’t come in last place!) I’m contemplating setting myself some sort of target such as another race somewhere so I have something to aim for — the end of the programme is all very well and good, but where do you go from there?

Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now I shall enjoy the small victory of successfully running for 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes and 5 minutes without stopping.

#oneaday Day 768: Two Weeks

Two weeks of my second runthrough of the Couch to 5K running programme, that is, and it’s going reasonably well so far.

Much as I discovered last time, building up stamina is actually a somewhat easier process than you might expect. I’m not sure if this is just because I’ve been doing semi-regular exercise for a while, a hangover from the last time I ran through this programme or something else entirely, but in the space of two weeks I’ve found that each time out there gets slightly, marginally easier than the last.

Of course, at this point in the programme I’m still only running for a minute and a half at a time, then walking for two minutes, then repeating the process. But still, every great journey starts with a single step and all that.

Running has, for me, always been one of the most challenging exercises there is to do, partly because there’s nothing “helping you”. Even when you’re running downhill, your body still has to do stuff, whereas on a bike all you have to do on a downhill stretch is stay upright and occasionally steer. But when you’re running, you’re constantly active — moving your body, lifting your entire body weight off the ground, shifting your legs, pushing forwards, pumping your arms, working all those muscles. It’s a pretty intense workout all round, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it’s pretty challenging.

As I found the last time I tried all this, though, it’s infinitely more interesting than running/cycling/rowing/whatever it is you’re doing on a crosstrainer on the spot, staring at a digital readout, trying desperately to ignore the terrible, terrible music the gym is pumping into your ears and also trying desperately not to look at the visible panty line of the woman with the nice arse in the yoga pants on the machine in front of you.

Sorry, momentarily distracted there.

But no. It is infinitely more interesting than working out in a gym simply because you have freedom, and that’s important. Okay, it becomes harder to control your workout so precisely when you have to deal with the sometimes unpredictable undulations of the route you decide to take, and at times you find yourself dodging pedestrians, dogs, low-flying seagulls and various animals’ poo. But that makes it interesting and exciting, even if you’re running the same route every day. You can mix things up by running at different times — that loop round the estate and past Sainsbury’s looks quite different when the sun has set to how it looks in the daytime. You can go the other way. You can take a random turning elsewhere and deliberately get lost in order to explore the area. You can run down darkened country lanes with a torch in the dead of night and pretend you’re Alan Wake. You can run down mysterious forest paths in the hope you might find some magical kingdom or The Faraway Tree inside (hint: you probably won’t, and all that is likely waiting for you at the other end is a large, muddy field that smells a bit like shit). In short, you can have a bit of fun with your exercising rather than enduring the businesslike approach of the gym.

That’s not saying the gym’s bad, of course — it’s good to have a sense of structure and “formality” to your workouts at times. But it’s also helpful to get out there and enjoy yourself with it, otherwise it simply becomes a chore, and chores are no fun whatsoever, and then they don’t get done and they build up and you feel guilty and obliged to do them all at once and then you swear never to let them get to that stage ever again and then you do and you swear lots and then you die.

Or something. Perhaps not.

This is my experience, anyway. I still go to the gym and I still enjoy doing so, but getting out there and running through my thrice-weekly Couch to 5K sessions has reminded me that going outside and Doing Stuff can be fun too. I recommend you try it.

#oneaday Day 764: Sports Day

Sports and me have never really got on. There are a variety of reasons for this but the long and the short of it is that said antipathy towards each other meant that 1) I was usually picked last for the teams in PE (when I wasn’t, it was usually Steven Finnegan instead) and 2) my body isn’t exactly a rippling temple of man-beef.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to get involved with sports over the years. I was in my Cub Scout football team, for example, a team so terrible we were sponsored by a junkyard. Our best result ever was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 20-0 to them. No, that’s not a typo. Twenty-nil.

Despite my ambivalence towards sport, I do also have some fond memories of various school sports days, particularly if it happened to be a nice day out at the time. I can’t remember a lot about primary school sports days, but secondary school sports days tended to be a pretty big deal, bringing most of the school to a standstill for a wide variety of track and field events.

My tutor group (the erstwhile 7FMQ, later 8QU, 9QU, 10QU and 11QU) were the very souls of apathy for the most part. There were certain events that people just plain didn’t want to enter, which would have put us at a significant disadvantage on the leaderboards (yes, this was in the day when it was still acceptable for school sports days to have “winners” and “losers”) had I not stepped in.

I’m not sure why I stepped in, given that I knew full well I was crap at sports, was not very good at running and wasn’t particularly agile. Therefore, you may be thinking, it would be somewhat foolhardy for me to enter both the 800m race and the high jump, but enter them I did, and I learned a number of things. Firstly, that I was surprisingly quite good at high jump, and secondly, that I was very poor at pacing myself when running — something which I still struggle somewhat with today.

The problem stemmed from the fact that I had never even considered running a long(ish)-distance race before, so I didn’t really know how they worked. As such, I was off the starting blocks like a fucking rocket and exhausted by the end of the first lap. This gave the rest of the pack, who had been pacing themselves somewhat more modestly, ample opportunity to catch up. I don’t think I finished last, to my credit, but it certainly wasn’t very far off. After the race ended, I went back to my tutor group’s area of the field, lay on the floor and didn’t move for a very long time.

The thing that sticks in my memory about that race, though, is not the fact that I ballsed it up so spectacularly. It’s the fact that for once, the rest of my tutor group was rooting for me. I spent a lot of my school days feeling like something of an outsider thanks to my awkward social skills, my weird accent, my crap hair and my forehead and nose’s tendencies to flare up with greasy zits. I was a geek and someone who did well, too, which made me pretty much the polar opposite of “cool”. Thankfully, barring a few exceptions, I was mostly left to my own devices to hang out with my equally geeky friends (most of whom had better hair than me) but this meant I didn’t feel a particularly strong sense of camaraderie with the rest of my tutor group.

Until that day. I heard them cheering for me as I ran past them on the first lap, and staggered past them on the second. And when I finished, far from being admonished for my poor pacing, I was congratulated and praised for getting out there and giving it a shot. It was a surprisingly special moment that’s stuck with me over the years. And while in short order things went back to being the way they had always been, for those few short minutes when I was on that track, I meant something. I was cool.

#oneaday Day 758: Keep Moving!

Thus far the return to a regular fitness routine has been going pretty well. I’ve shaken off all vague feelings of illness, so I can’t use that as an excuse any more, and I have a variety of activities that I’m able to do so I don’t get bored. Also, as stupid as it sounds, associating the act of running with one of my favourite characters from Katawa Shoujo — that’s Emi, for anyone not tuning out when I mention that game now — gives me a positive attitude towards it, even if I suck in comparison to people who are fitter and slimmer than me.

Fitness is tricky business, though, as anyone who has tried to get themselves into a decent routine and struggled will attest. Just arbitrarily deciding that you are going to “get fit” isn’t enough for most people, in my experience. You need things to aim for and the means through which to motivate yourself.

I thought what I’d do today is share what I’m doing in the hope that it might rub off on some of you. Feel free to pinch any of my ideas if you’re struggling with the whole “motivation” thing.

First up, I have a selection of things to do — I don’t do the same thing all the time. If you’re a gym member, it’s easy to think that you should be using the gym as much as possible, and when you’re there, it’s also very easy to get stuck in a rut doing the same routine over and over and over again. And sure, sticking to a routine can allow you to work on the parts of the body that you’d really like to focus on, but good grief it gets boring after a while.

So mix it up. When you’re at the gym, try some different machines. If you do weight training, use the machines sometimes and the free weights at others. Try using barbells if you normally use dumbbells. Challenge some different cardiovascular machines. Bump up the difficulty. Set yourself more lofty targets — ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes. Challenge yourself to meet those targets without stopping for a rest, or with only a certain number of rests, or completing a certain amount of distance in that time period.

But don’t necessarily stick to the gym. Go outside and do something like cycling or running. While you may feel horrendously self-conscious attempting to perambulate your wheezing carcass at a faster speed than your normal zombie-like shamble in an environment that contains other people, there are plenty of ways to tune out the outside world. Loud music, for example — and we’ll come back to that point in a minute. The clothing you wear makes a difference, too — hide your face under a hoodie or a hat and you’ll feel much less self-conscious, plus you get the added bonus of being able to pretend you’re Ezio Auditore running away from the city guards. That and keeping the windchill off your ears, too. Also bear in mind that there’s a strong possibility that anyone who sees you running — especially in inclement weather conditions — will be impressed at your dedication to bettering yourself. (This rule is also known as the “Fat People Shouldn’t Be Ashamed To Be Seen At The Gym Rule”.)

On the subject of music, pick something that inspires you. No-one else is going to hear it (unless you have crap headphones that leak sound everywhere, and even then only if you’re exercising around other people and playing your music at full volume) so it can be absolutely anything you want, even the most shameful of crap in your iTunes library. In fact, in the age of Spotify, you can feel free to try out different genres of music to see what gets your pumped up. You may find that 80s cheese does the trick, or thumping dance beats, or — God forbid — dubstep.

Podcasts are a good thing to insert into your earholes while you’re exercising too, not because they’re inherently energetic in themselves, but because they provide the illusion of time passing more quickly. By concentrating on the sound of peoples’ voices and what they are saying, you’ll find you naturally stop clockwatching, simply letting your body run on automatic while you listen to, say, the Minotti brothers yelling at each other on the Exploding Barrel Podcast, or the Squadron of Shame waxing lyrical about chin-strokey gaming topics.

My personal recommendation for listening material is to check out some soundtracks, both movies and games. Action movie soundtracks and games that are full of spectacle typically provide excellent soundtracks to work out to — particular favourites of mine include the soundtracks to Speed, the Matrix series, Metal Gear Solid, Split/Second, Shadow of the Colossus (particularly awesome when lifting weights), the bizarrely cheerful soundtrack to the iPhone version of DoDonPachi Resurrection and Space Channel 5. If you’re a JRPG fan, battle themes are particularly awesome to work out to. If you can create a crescendo of intensity culminating in the most epic final boss themes you can find, so much the better. There’s no better feeling than finishing that last set of reps as the choir starts belting out One Winged Angel.

Finally, and I think this is probably the most powerful motivational factor in my case: track your progress. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut, but to see measurable results provides powerful inspiration to push yourself harder and go a little further. Exactly how you do this is up to you, but as a gamer and social media junkie I use Runkeeper to track cardiovascular workouts (including mapping my runs when I go outside) and the very excellent Fitocracy social game/network to log complete workouts. I also share my completed workouts on Facebook and Twitter. While some may not like the “spam”, it’s easy enough to ignore, and the few people who do congratulate me on a job well done after the fact makes it worthwhile.

On that note, if you can build up a support network for yourself — be it people you regularly work out with or online friends who cheer you on from afar — you’ll find yourself motivated to succeed, particularly if they’re the sort of friends who would rib you mercilessly if you give up. If you’re going through a programme like the Couch to 5K thing I shared with you all the other day, then work with a friend or team to get through it together.

Above all, though, have fun with it. It may feel like work at times because it is — it’s something you need to make yourself do, and made of activities that your body often doesn’t feel like doing if you tend to live a fairly sedentary lifestyle. But unlike going to actual work, you’re free to tackle it and make it fun in whatever manner you please rather than sitting in a cubicle allowing your soul to be sucked out through your ergonomically-designed management keyboard.

I hope that’s made some of you think a bit. C’mon, if I can get off my arse and get active, I’m pretty sure that you (yes, you, with the beard/glasses/pointy nose/weird hair/lovely hair/nice tits/flatulence/worryingly prominent erection/kind face/greasy trout in your hand/jar of olives clutched to your breast/smelly armpits [delete as applicable]) can do it too.

#oneaday Day 756: Emi’s Inspiration

Bettering yourself is a difficult thing to do. First of all, you have to really want to change, which isn’t necessarily the same as not liking something about yourself. It’s the difference between self-pitying cries of “I hate that I’m like this!” and inspirational yells of “I may be like this now, but you better watch out, cause I’ma kick your ass!” or something equally obnoxious.

There are lots of ways you might want to change yourself. It could be eating better, working on a new creative project, getting more exercise. Chances are, there is something you would rather do better — probably even several things. Once you’ve picked one, that’s where the challenge comes in — motivation to begin.

Inspiration can come from the strangest places. In this post back in 2009, I commented on the strange effect that changing my Second Life avatar from one which loosely looked like me to someone rather more buff an’ ting had on me. I suddenly felt inspired to better myself, and to attempt to hammer and chisel my flabby body into some sort of shape, to be more like my virtual self.

Well, I can’t say that it had a massive effect on me — I’m still overweight and would very much like to change that — but that initial push over the edge gave me some preliminary interest in fitness, and the knowledge that yes, I could do it if I applied myself.

Later on, I tried the Couch to 5K running programme, which takes 9 weeks to get you from wheezing, sweating mess up to someone who can run continuously for half an hour without stopping. It’s an excellent system, and one which has a very positive impact on anyone who tries it. But again, it can sometimes be difficult to get started.

One of the interesting things that those of us who have played Katawa Shoujo noticed was the inspirational effect that some of the characters had on members of the community. I’m not necessarily even talking in the “overcoming their disability” sense — rather, I’m referring to certain admirable character traits which a number of the girls in the game demonstrate to both protagonist Hisao and the player themselves proving to be a powerful motivational factor.

The most oft-cited example of this is Emi, an amputee girl and track star who describes herself as “The Fastest Thing on No Legs”. She overcame her disability to become a strong, fit runner, so why shouldn’t a person without a physical disability be able to do the same thing, too?

You can probably see where this is going.

What would happen, then, if you combined the infectiously cheerful, never-give-up personality of Emi with the well-paced Couch to 5K programme? Well, you get the following chart, which I include here after the break as a courtesy to that certain subset of you who have played Katawa Shoujo and are considering taking up running but having absolutely no idea where to start. Indeed, even those of you who haven’t played Katawa Shoujo but would like to be able to run for more than five seconds without HHNNNGGGGing can benefit from this. (To support the programme, I also recommend downloading this app for iPhone.)

As for me, I’m back into an almost-regular gym routine but haven’t done a long run for quite some time, so am planning on ploughing through the whole Couch to 5K programme again — with Emi’s help, of course — very soon. I shall be providing occasional progress updates on here when I can be bothered and/or when I don’t have anything interesting to write about that day.

Why don’t you get up off your arse and join me? See you on the track.

(Click Continue Reading if you’re on the front page to see Emi’s chart.)

Continue reading “#oneaday Day 756: Emi’s Inspiration” →

#oneaday Day 149: Tomorrow I May Be Dead

Ominous title, I know. But given that I’m running a 10K tomorrow, it’s entirely possible it might be true. Okay, it probably won’t be true. But it’s an eye-catching title if nothing else.

So yes. Let me start again. Tomorrow I am running the Bupa 10K in London in aid of Mind, a mental health charity that some friends and I decided to represent back towards the beginning of the year. So far I’ve raised £150.01 (thanks to Generous Sam for the extra penny) and hope that a few of you will be feeling generous in the next few hours. It’d be cool to get the total over £200 before I finish tomorrow. That’d be nice. If you’d like to sponsor me, go ahead.

I’m a little worried about the run itself, to be honest. Pacific time-friendly working hours have played havoc with the training regime I got myself into at the start of the year, and I haven’t had nearly as much practice of going the whole distance as I hoped I would have by now. Still, I have done it a few times, so I know that I’m capable of it. It’s just going to be a case of pacing myself and making sure that I keep pushing on regardless — the only difference will be the fact I have a magic chip on my shoe to reveal my embarrassing time to the world when I do eventually wheeze over the finish line.

But hey. If I do manage to complete it, that’ll be a pretty big accomplishment. A long run and a healthy amount of money raised for charity. Not bad at all for a Bank Holiday Monday’s work.

Beyond that, I couldn’t say what’s next. It would make sense to find something else to “aim” for, either personally, professionally, physically or all three. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, though. For now, I just have to survive 10km of the London streets without collapsing and dying. Easier said than done, and if there’s no Day 150, you’ll know that I’ve bought it.

Positivity! Chances are, though, that I won’t be dead and tomorrow evening there will be a Day 150 explaining politely that I am absolutely knackered and hope I never have to go through anything like that ever again. Or perhaps I’ll be high on endorphins and writing complete nonsense. (No change there, then.)

Either way, I’m going to plug my sponsorship page again. If you have a few quid (or a lot of quid) to spare, then dig deep and chuck me and Mind some cash. Where? Right here.

#oneaday, Day 53: Mr Motivation

Motivation is a curious beast. And it’s not a case of either “having it” or “not having it”, there are many complex factors involved. And sometimes, apparently, blind chance.

Take today. I got my ass soundly kicked by a boss in Final Fantasy XIII (which I am enjoying a lot so a big middle finger to all of you who hate it) so instead of swearing profusely and trying again, I swore profusely, turned off the PS3, said to myself (silently, because saying it out loud with no-one else nearby would just be weird) “I’m going to go and run 10km now,” and then went and ran 10km. I’d say “just like that” but it took over an hour and a half, and anything over a couple of minutes is automatically disqualified from “just like that” status.

Anyway, casual bragging that I’ve achieved my goal of running 10K aside, I find that sudden bursts of motivation like that happen at the strangest of times… and it’s very difficult to force them. Impossible, in fact. They’re a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive sort of thing… which makes it rather inconvenient when you actually need some motivation to do something.

Part of the issue is, of course, prior successes. My running has been a slow but sure upward slope of little victories, one step at a time, and so that has provided ample motivation to continue and keep pushing myself to the next milestone, no pun intended. Contrast this with the jobhunting, on the other hand, which has been a string of ignorance, incompetence and idiocy—none of which was my fault—and it’s understandable how I may be feeling a little disheartened on that particular front. Still, I am cracking on with it and have yet another bunch of applications in now. It remains to be seen if anything will come of these ones. Some of them, again, are even relevant to what I want to do, though the pay is all over the place. I’m kind of taking the opinion now that any money coming in is better than no money, particularly if the job in the question offers a potentially good “foot in the door” for other Good Things. Which at least one of the things I’ve applied for does.

So we shall see. But it has been a long time since I’ve felt that same surge of motivation for the jobhunting than I have for the running. Perhaps it’s because of the difference between something I want to do and something I have to do. No-one likes feeling obliged to do things—given the opportunity, most people would rather be able to stay in bed as long as they like and then spend their days doing any combination of eating pies, playing video games, watching TV, staring at the Internet, wandering through fields of flowers, driving expensive cars very fast, wanking, listening to music, smashing Justin Bieber albums over the heads of people they don’t like very much, giving and/or receiving oral sex, smoking weed, drawing pictures and eating Lindor chocolates—and so anything that you need to do that gets in the way of doing those things that you want is automatically parsed by your brain as being an inconvenience.

Perhaps I just need to want to find a job more. For that to happen, though, I need to spot the Awesomest Job Ever That Is A Complete Shoe-In For My Appointment And That No-One Else Will Ever Apply For.

What’s that? AwesomeTech are looking for a “Playing Final Fantasy In Bed Technician Called Pete” for £50,000 a year? I’m so there.

Sigh. A man can dream, huh?

#oneaday, Day 48: RUN.

It’s been a while since I talked about my exercise-related endeavours, so I figured why the hell not now? (You can, of course, follow my exercise-related Tumblr if you’re that way inclined.)

Basically, it’s going quite well. I’ve done two “long runs” of 8.25km now, which suggests that by the time May and the 10K I’ve signed up for comes around, I’ll be ready to run that distance. It may be slowly and involve a lot of guttural grunting (particularly on hilly bits) but I should be able to at least do it. And why 8.25km? Well, convenience. I set out from my house in one direction, run down a country lane that seems to go on forever (2 miles), turn down a road and do a big loop around on a slightly less country laney country lane that also seems to go on forever before making one last turn onto another, marginally more country laney than the second country lane but less country laney than the first country lane country lane and ending up coming up the street my house is on from the other end. It shouldn’t be too much difficulty to extend the route to 10K, but at the moment I’m pretty knackered by the time I get to this distance, so it’ll be a case of extending it a bit at a time.

I may still be pretty slow, but I’m certainly pleased with my progress since I started towards the end of last year. Setting up some form of “structure” and quasi-reward mechanic has helped enormously. To begin with, this was the Couch 2 5K programme, that got me off my ass and moving in the first place. In the first week of that, I was exhausted by the time I’d been running for just a minute but gradually built up to being able to run for 30 minutes at a time. I started the Bridge 2 10K programme but the holiday period disrupted that somewhat. Rather than go back to that, I’ve simply been doing three runs a week—one pace-setting one of 5K or so, one “long” one (8.25K at the minute, that will eventually become 10K) and one interval training session (currently three sets of four lots of run fast 1 minute, run moderately 1 minute, repeat with 2 minutes of walking in between each set). I’ve been using the RunKeeper app on my phone to track my progress, and it’s always pretty cool to see yourself make some sort of improvement, even if it’s only a matter of seconds. Plus you can use it to draw penises on Google Maps if you get bored.

Alongside this, I’ve recently started using the 100 Pushups and 200 Situps apps for the iPhone. These are very simple apps, just recommending the number of reps you should do in each of five sets, but they’re also effective in providing a bit of structure to your workouts. And structure is good; structure makes you feel like you’re making progress, because you can tick things off (or gain points for them in EpicWin, which is another worthwhile motivational app for iPhones) and see at a glance how “well” you’re doing.

While I doubt I’m ever going to be one of the skin-head tank-top wearing nutcases who frequent British gyms, it’s good to know that I am making some progress, and I bet it’s going to feel pretty damn special to complete that 10K in May.

You think it’s awesome too, right? Sure you do. So you want to fling a few quid my way and sponsor me, don’t you? Of course you do. And very gratefully received it is too.

#oneaday, Day 312: Quest Complete: C25K

I’ve been somewhat short of what one might call “victories” recently. In fact, most of my endeavours for the last I-don’t-know-how-long-now have ended in what could politely be called failure. As such, I’ve been in a bit of a funk recently, getting very tired of… well, everything, really.

So when an actual, genuine, bona fide victory-slash-achievement rears its head, by golly I’m going to celebrate it.

Tonight I completed the nine week Couch 2 5K running programme, introduced to me by one Mr Calin Grajko, who is a really cool guy and, I have it on good authority, doesn’t afraid of anything. I’ve mentioned this a few times previously, but for those of you who can’t be bothered to look back a few entries, have joined me recently or who are having trouble finding exactly what you want using the search box (which is fine by me), let me explain.

Over the course of nine weeks, you go from being someone who “can’t run” to someone who, well, can. The first week begins with you running for a minute at a time, then walking for 90 seconds, then repeating this process several times. Each week ups the ante somewhat until you reach the final week when, in theory, you should be able to run for 30 minutes at a time without stopping.

When I started the programme, I seriously doubted that I’d ever be able to do more than a couple of minutes at a time. I deliberately hadn’t looked at what horrors the end of the programme had to offer because I figured the system shock would just put me off and demotivate me. So it was a genuine surprise each week to find out what I’d be doing. It was a big surprise in the last few weeks when the jumps started getting bigger.

But I’m pleased to announce that I can now run for 30 minutes without stopping. It’s not easy, sure, and I’m not quite at that elusive 5K distance just yet (not far off, though—my best distance in 30 minutes is 2.99 miles, just under the 3.1 miles that roughly equates to a 5K) but I figure I can get there with a bit more training. Tonight, I felt a noticeable increase in my speed, for example, though that disappeared with the hilly bits towards the end of tonight’s run.

The important thing with any exercise regime is motivation, and making sure you keep this motivation flowing in both the short and long term. By “short term”, I mean “while you’re doing your exercise”, and by “long term” I mean “the duration of the programme and beyond”.

Through this programme, I think I’ve got both of those things pretty comfortably sorted. The long-term motivation is handled nicely by the programme itself—making constant, regular, measurable progress is motivation in and of itself. Plus telling friends that you’ve completed week whatever-it-is is something you can genuinely take pride in, particularly if your friends are appreciative of what you’ve been trying to do.

The short-term motivation—keeping going while in the middle of a session—can be harder. If you run out of energy, you run out of energy. Part of this is about pacing yourself, but it’s also about not getting too bored of what you’re doing as well.

As such, I have made sure to have some banging playlists on my iPhone while out on my running sessions, matched reasonably well-ish with the timings of each session. Me being me, these songs have mostly fallen into the video game soundtrack category. Conveniently, though, the generally regular tempo and “inspiring” nature of a lot of game music makes it entirely appropriate for use in exercising. So without further pontificating on the philosophy of exercise (there are plenty of people out there who can comment on it with much more authority than I) I will share with you my playlist for tonight’s run. iPhone users, tap the song titles to play the tunes. Everyone else, you should have a fancy-pants Flash player to play each song with.

Warm-Up: The Elite (from Split/Second)

The Split/Second soundtrack was a fixture on my playlists. For the first few weeks, my playlist consisted solely of the Split/Second soundtrack. Because it’s awesome. And free. But this song in particular was an excellent warm-up track because it builds up a bit at a time. There’s also a spooky bit in the middle with jangly guitars that is great when you’re going out at night-time. During this piece, I was doing my 5-minute walk as a warmup for the main event.

Get Ready: Operation Briefing (from Trauma Center: Second Opinion)

The sole reason this song is in there is so that the woman on the GetRunning app which gives verbal coaching for the C25K programme has something unnecessarily dramatic to talk over while she’s briefing you about how long you’ll be running for. Timing the start of playback perfectly will mean that you start running with the next piece, which is…

Go!: Friend (from Bayonetta)

If you’ve never played Bayonetta, know that it’s a study in glorious excess. SPOILER: There is a bit where you ride a motorbike up a rocket into space in order to go and rescue the titular Bayonetta, who has gotten herself trapped in the crystalline eye of God, who happens to be a large female statue that is more than a bit pissed off. This music is from that bit. And it’s awesome. It’s also perfect music to get you pumped up and moving. The tempo is a good pace for running to.

Jenova Returns (from Final Fantasy VII, OCRemix album)

And so begins a set of Final Fantasy VII pieces, or more specifically some awesome remixes by the immensely talented community at OCRemix. When this piece gets all dramatic in the middle, I was just hitting my stride tonight. Which was good.

Beginning of the End (from Final Fantasy VII, OCRemix album)

This is one of my favourite pieces from FFVII. The original version always used to get my pulse racing as the final battle with Sephiroth began. Used at this point in the playlist, I was just starting to feel the proverbial “burn” a bit, and the overdramatic nature of it helped push me through.

Black Wing Metamorphosis (from Final Fantasy VII, OCRemix album)

This is a great, creative remix of the song that everyone knows from FFVII—the final boss theme, One Winged Angel. Bad-ass choirs and screaming guitars? That sounds like motivation to me.

Final Battle: Opportunity (from Skies of Arcadia)

You may be spotting something of a pattern with these pieces. Since it was my last run, I figured I’d make it something of an “occasion” with some ridiculously overdramatic music. The Skies of Arcadia final boss theme is neat because it starts ominous, threatening and dramatic and turns triumphant and victorious by the end. In-game, these changes happened according to how well the battle was going, so you could tell aurally when you were winning. Knowing this sent me subconscious signals that I was on the home straight.

Possibly.

Panic Attack (by Dream Theater)

I loved this song ever since I first encountered it in Rock Band 2, where it gave my fingers something of a workout. And cramp. It’s also, like, deep and stuff, cause I can, like, totally relate to the lyrics and whatnot, yeah?

In an exercise sense, it’s fast, gets the adrenaline flowing and has the line “rapid heartbeat pounding in my chest” in the middle of it. So it’s, like, appropriate.

Of course, it also has the line “I am terrified, so afraid to die” in it. Which, depending on your fitness level, may also be appropriate.

Navras (from The Matrix Revolutions)

Ever since I first heard this piece, I thought it would be an awesome accompaniment to some sort of final battle. In fact, a variation on this piece called Neodämmerung is used in the final battle with Mr Smith in The Matrix Revolutions. This piece, to my mind, though, is superior and is only used in the end credits.

So why not have this piece as the grand finale to the nine-week push? Why not indeed. Conveniently, my 30 minutes were up just as it got to the slow bit in the middle, so I got to cool down to some trippy floaty ethnic-sounding warbling. Which was nice.

So, in summary, then? Keep your motivation up (possibly through the use of some banging tunes) and you can achieve whatever goal you want. I’ve achieved one, which is something of a relief after so many things that have gone wrong over the last couple of years.

Now, just another 50-something posts to go to achieve another goal…