It's Much More Friendly With Two

It’s dark, it might be wet, it’s certainly cold, bloody freezing is probably more accurate. Your tired, the bus has taken forever to do a relatively short journey, you had the misfortune of sitting next to the really fat person who takes up half of your seat as well as their own, that is unless you have to stand, there was a screaming child that gave you a headache even though you had your headphones on. You get home, the house is warm, the beer is cold, tonight’s football will be well worth your attention, what do you do?

That’s right, you go out for a run.

Why not give it a miss? Just this once. You’re tired remember, and it’s cold, you won’t run well, how can you run well? This is just the time you get injured, and think of the lovely sunny Sunday morning’s you’ll miss, not to mention the set back to your well worked out training plan. No one will know, well, only the people you live with, they won’t snitch, right?

But you can’t, you’ve agreed to run with someone, they’ll be hear in a minute, you’ll have to tell them you don’t fancy it. It’s always harder admitting it to someone else than yourself. Not to mention you had the bright idea to write a sodding blog about your training, and your stats page is telling you that people are actually reading it, damn!

My brain goes into split personality mode at moments like this, with the runner side of me always winning, not least because, like I say, it’s harder to quit when you have to tell someone else.

The argument I always put to my weaker side is, once you get out there, once you get moving, you’ll forget that part of you would rather still be in the warm. And that side of me is always right.

I’ve written a lot about the good and bad side of being a blind runner. One definite tick in the plus column is always having to run with someone else, no
loneliness of the long distance runner here.

During the week, when any or all of the above can come into play, having someone else there to encourage, motivate or even bully if required makes a big difference. Runners are humans, not machines, we all have moments where we’d prefer to cut a training session short.

Come the weekend and the long Sunday run, the time passes much quicker if you’ve got company, putting the world to right as you go.

Tomorrow my companion will be one who has just returned from supervising
England’s Ashes winning success; I’m hoping two hours will be enough to give me a full, day-by-day account of his three weeks down under.

I know some of the readers to this blog are not the exercising type. I’m pretty confident that some of these will have started the year with all the good intentions about getting fitter and being a bit healthier. If, or when, your brain starts having meetings with itself about whether the effort is worth putting in, toughing it out in pairs is so much easier.

Like Piglet said when wishing Pooh was with him as he was totally surrounded by water, “it’s much more friendly with two”.