A Grim Challenge
Our friend Joe, over at Joseph Bloggs has been challenged by his brother-in-law to run the Grim Challenge, an 8 mile "Cross-country" jaunty in December (where "Cross-country" means cold mud, cold water and cold muddy water). This is where off-the-cuff bravado gets you, Joe - beware!
And muggins here has agreed to do it with him... I figure I'll be done with the triathlon season by October and will have time to train up for some off-roading. And anyway, the ERR crew keep telling me how wonderful cross-country is. Let's see where off-the-cuff bravado gets me.
Joe plays a lot of football (quite well too - or so he tells me), so is fit enough, but he doesn't do much "running" (as opposed to sprinting back and forth and falling over, which I think is the key skill in football). So he wants to know how fast and how far he can run. This is presumably so that when he puts a nice little wager down on himself he can do it with some accuracy.
We went out for a first run together this morning. I very rarely run "with" someone else (as opposed to "against" them), but as I've said before it can be very motivating and gives two great benefits:
I also made more use of my Nike+ and ipod, just to track our pace and distance. It really is a fantastic tool, and despite what I say about about real-life-people being motivating, I get a bigger buzz from Lance Armstrong saying "Well done" to me at the end of a long workout! I'll do a review at some point, but for now, and at last, here is the point of this article: the Nike+ website lets you graph your runs, so here, Joe, is our run. The 1st and 6th km are my runs from my house to the 'so called mid-point' between our houses. But the rest is pure Joe.
And muggins here has agreed to do it with him... I figure I'll be done with the triathlon season by October and will have time to train up for some off-roading. And anyway, the ERR crew keep telling me how wonderful cross-country is. Let's see where off-the-cuff bravado gets me.
Joe plays a lot of football (quite well too - or so he tells me), so is fit enough, but he doesn't do much "running" (as opposed to sprinting back and forth and falling over, which I think is the key skill in football). So he wants to know how fast and how far he can run. This is presumably so that when he puts a nice little wager down on himself he can do it with some accuracy.
We went out for a first run together this morning. I very rarely run "with" someone else (as opposed to "against" them), but as I've said before it can be very motivating and gives two great benefits:
- it allows me to run at a different pace from my normal plod (we started off more slowly because Joe only has little legs, but then sprinted like a bugger when we started discussing Fartlek sessions)
- the time seems to go more quickly when you have someone to chat with
I also made more use of my Nike+ and ipod, just to track our pace and distance. It really is a fantastic tool, and despite what I say about about real-life-people being motivating, I get a bigger buzz from Lance Armstrong saying "Well done" to me at the end of a long workout! I'll do a review at some point, but for now, and at last, here is the point of this article: the Nike+ website lets you graph your runs, so here, Joe, is our run. The 1st and 6th km are my runs from my house to the 'so called mid-point' between our houses. But the rest is pure Joe.
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