andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

Shouts out to Oana and Moni, who are sometimes reading my rambles on this site out in Romania, for reasons best known to themselves. And Tee and Lids and Dee, who also check it out, and Garv and Shell. And the rest of the crew.

That’s me, going home from somewhere. Click to get full size.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before on this site, but I’ll say it again because I enjoy a bit of repetition; I like running. There has been an interesting idea that people have had from time to time which is that I’m not lazy. It’s rubbish. I am lazy. If I could sleep for twenty hours a day, I would, occasionally foraging for food and the toilet. If I could sit somewhere and stay there forever, being endlessly pandered to by divine beauties, I would. (Hey, who wouldn’t?)It’s good for me and keeps me fit. It’s challenging (occasionally bordering on brutal). It’s hard work, which conflicts directly with my inherent laziness and I like the challenge of that too. I always wanted to get into running but I never had the discipline or the lifestyle to accomodate it so I didn’t do it, which is a shame because now I’m that bit older and it’s harder work than it used to be.

I don’t like running on pavement or roads, which is part of what’s discouraged me in the past; the run to anywhere with soft ground can be sore on the knees and ankles. I like ‘off-road’, running cross-country, grass, mud, trees, uneven ground, holes, branches, obstacles, small vicious, hungry creatures… It’s more interesting and a lot less hard on the legs. Running on hard ground can really damage your legs through the impact they have to take, even with good running shoes. Also, I like mountain-biking, a sport that sadly I can’t really indulge in because I don’t live near any mountains, and I don’t have a car to get to them with. The Phoenix park is allegedly the biggest walled city park in Europe. I don’t know about that, it may well be true, but although truly massive and a great place to running or walking, an odd fact is that half of that isn’t accessible to the public; there is the President’s residence, the American ambassador’s residence, the Ordnance Survey offices… All sorts of stuff that you can’t get into because it is private. Which makes it a lot smaller in practice, and a little annoying to navigate around.Anyway, now I live beside the Phoenix Park and I’ve made myself do the seventeen or so minute run to the park and then run around there like a psychopath for as long as I can manage before I have to run back and get changed for work. Yes, I do this in the morning before work, in the dark, sometime between 6 and 7. I cheat sometimes, because Annette offers me a lift in and generally speaking I’d be a fool to pass that up. I’ll have to stop though because I’ve realised that I might be less focused when I get out of the car and start running, partly due to Annette’s sparkling company (which makes me believe there may be more to life than pain and misery, at the crucial moment when I need to believe in pain and misery), and partly due the fact that her car is a warm comfortable place to be. Once I get out I’ve lost some of my puritanical desire to inflict health and pain on myself in equal measure.

Phoenix park, early in the morning. Traffic jam already. Click to view larger.

I run, then I walk or jog, then I run, I sprint, I walk or jog, I stand and survey where I am in the darkness, I run, I walk or jog, chase deer and so on. It goes on like this for anywhere up to two hours (not in the morning runs, as a rule), by which time I can’t feel my legs any more. I do it more regularly recently, too.

It’s a bit Lord of The Rings in the park, sometimes. Click to view larger.

So, we’ve accepted that I do this thing, this running, which has me up and hurting myself at stupid hours of the morning, no matter how wet or cold it is. But why? I mean, I like running, but I also like ice cream and I haven’t tried to drown myself in it yet. The motivation is the maintainance of my health and fitness, which are things becoming ever more precious and dear to me now that I’m scant weeks away from being thirty-three, and also because the highlight of my week is the hour of five-a-side football that I play badly every Friday evening with a bunch of guys, most of whom are a lot better than me at football… Fitness is about the only thing I can count on to make sure that I don’t look like a complete fool on that pitch; I can break that down into two areas, my ability to sprint, and my remarkably large lungs, and obviously that’s all covered by fitness.

Fantastic views, beautiful meadows, deer, the park has it all.Shame it’s too dark to see any of it. Click to view larger.

But there’s more! I’ve had an ongoing obsession with my weight over the last few years. I have a stocky build and a slow metabolism, and combine that with the aforementioned apathy and you have a recipe for getting a bit too big around the middle for comfort. Before I forget, I’ve recently realised another possible motive for all of this; I’m living in a house with three attractive, sexy, strong-minded, independent women. I’ll be fairly surprised if I haven’t started lactating and synchronising my periods with them within another month. It’s great, sometimes I think it’s like a Carlsberg house-share, but maybe I’m secretly worried that I’m going to lose my manliness. It is true, as far as I know, that men sharing a house have higher testosterone levels; and a guy sharing with a group of women… I had better find my ruler and keep an eye on this… More about life in the house to follow.I’m never going to look like Johnny Depp, but at least I can avoid waddling around like the late John Candy (and I’ve come close, in dark days when I got stuck into my comfort food.). So, I feel I’m perpetually fighting the flab and trying to get back to seventy five kilos, like I was when I was nineteen or so… I actually managed to get very, very lean in Australia due to the eight hour a day workout from stacking boxes which were anywhere up to twenty kilos, higher than me, and that was no joke (aided by not being able to afford to eat huge amounts of food, which helped to stave off the extra fat). Running really is a great way to lose weight in a hurry and I have no doubt I’ll have a whole new set of stretch marks around my midriff to prove it.

I also started swimming in a pool near where I work, but that’s been a much less successful effort. Watching me in that pool, you’d think I hadn’t swam before. I drank my way from one end of the pool to the other like a huge ungainly water slug, I’m surprised they didn’t try to harpoon me on the way down to try and preserve the water level in the pool, and I’ve been finding all sorts of excuses not to get back into the water there. If came across Jaws and he decided to have a go at me, I’d just drink everything and strand him on the spot; it’s not an idle threat either. I’d do him.

Somewhere between this renewed assault on my health and fitness, and the season (it’s Spring, for those who hadn’t noticed) or perhaps the full moon, or maybe stress from work, I was feeling down this last weekend. I couldn’t sleep late last week, maybe getting two or three real hours of sleep in between being half awake, tossing and turning, thrashing around like a sweaty dying carp and waking myself up with talking loudly in my sleep. It was pretty awful and I was completely burnt out by the end of Saturday… The Friday night football game was great but my fitness deserted me as if I hadn’t been training during the week which was a bad feeling. That didn’t help, and I think the lack of sleep probably went a long way towards that.

So, that is the epic story of me and running. I probably haven’t put in half of what I intended but there’s more to come shortly about the delicate art of disorganised five-a-side football, and some other odds and ends…