Would you believe it . . . I'm big in Russia!

Well, when I say 'big' what I mean is that over the last few days my Russian audience has been larger than my UK audience!.  So I would like to say a very big thank you to everyone who reads this but in particular to the people in Russia, I hope you enjoy what I write and I would love to hear from you, especially if you can offer me any advice - so long as it's not 'don't do it'.

Ok, over the last week and a half there has been a great deal of soul searching, a lot of muttering and shouting at myself, a lot of reading and a lot of . . . walking!!! yes, not gone too well but after the blood incident I wasn't really expecting that it would.  I've been on the iron tablets, I've discovered proteins and carbs and now I'm filling myself with wholegrain rice, pasta, bread, bagals - and bananas, loads and loads of bananas.  My last online shop resulted in the purchase of 48 bananas and a miniature birthday cake between 8 of us for my mother in laws 90th birthday.  Most weeks there is some sort of problem with my online shop, one week it was bags of castor sugar, another week we were overwhelmed by pork chops.  You have to wonder what my 'picker' must of thought while she was piling the trolley with bananas - maybe she thought I was holding a tennis tournament, or I kept monkeys! unfortunately Andrew didn't quite see the funny side when I suggested that we spray them gold and hang them on the Christmas tree, he just couldn't see past the £9.00 I had spent on bananas that totally smashed the shopping budget this week.

Alongside the bananas, the carbs, the protein and the iron every cupboard door in the kitchen is now covered with inspirational words, there are poems, thoughts and sayings.  My favourite, and I'm serious now, is one by Mohammad Ali, it goes:

Champions aren't made in gyms.
Champions are made from something they have deep inside them:
A desire, a dream, a vision.
They have to have last minute stamina, they have to be a little faster,
they have to have the skill and the will.
But the will must be stronger than the skill.

With this in mind I have been attempting to take this bloke Will out with me for the last week or so but at the crucial moments he seems to desert me and all I come up with is an ever growing list of excuses.  The blood incident has become a huge excuse ... 'I can't do it because I gave blood and the internet says you won't be able to run'  dogs, on or off leads are another excuse . . . 'you can't run past a dog, it'll chase you' being on my own - that is a truly pathetic excuse . . . 'I never run as well when I'm on my own' and then this week, the best yet . . . a puddle, yes, you heard right, I stopped because of a puddle.  It was a rather large puddle and I could hear a car coming, I thought, for goodness sake Viv's you're a runner go through it, would Paula Radcliffe stop? - unfortunately though, and I just couldn't stop it, this picture of Dawn French in the Vicar of Dibley came into my head, when she playfully jumped in a puddle infront of this chap she was madly in love with and ended up neck deep in mud! I had to stop and wait until the car past before I could navigate my way around it and then I shouted at my legs 'RUN' - 'you've stopped now' they replied.  'MOVE' - 'not a chance' they said 'you can't stop and start at the drop of a hat'.  Where for goodness sake was Will??

I have though changed my training programme, greatest respect to the marathon's programme, I'm sure they know what they are doing but it works in minutes and I wanted to have some idea of how far I was running, after all, the marathon is a distance race.  I go so slowly that when I eventually try to run a distance it could be a dreadful disappointment.  So now we are regularly going out to run 3 miles and on Sunday we did 4 - although we didn't run a great deal of it = failure, we are doing longer distances week by week = success, so it does feel as though we are moving forwards, we do also try to walk quite fast, infact my coach is convinced I walk faster than I lope??  Yesterday however, we did walk more than we ran which was really annoying my coach so I decided to do a bit of lounge loping on my rest day today in an effort to catch up.  I loped for 40 minutes which is roughly the time it took us to walk/lope the 3 miles, I'm going to do this again tomorrow and then go out again on Thursday, I'm hoping something inside my brain will say 'you can lope for 40 minutes inside and outside is no different so you can do this'  I just can't see why it is so different inside.

Hopefully some day soon I shall come across Will while I'm out running and I will begin to toughen up a bit and stop wasting time inventing excuses.

If you can, I would be really grateful if you would sponsor me, my very first blog 'To this Point' explains who I am doing this for and why.  You can sponsor me at:

www.virginmoneygiving.com/VivienneKanharn

Thank you