In the beginning

Welcome to our space!

I’m training for my first marathon. Not just any marathon. The Singapore Marathon. Why do a marathon in London when you can travel to a hot humid country where it is illegal to chew gum?

Like all good ideas, it all started as a conversation held in a pub, which I think started along the lines of “I bet you can’t”. Obviously I bet I could and a glorious plan was born.

The logic for choosing Singapore is 3 fold:
1) My friend who I’m running with has a brother who lives in Singapore so accommodation will be cheap or free (but may involve sofas and bits of floor).
2) Neither of us has been to Singapore before and
3) we also figure we can take a look at Malaysia while we are there.

We wanted to do a marathon because we’ve both turned into puddings in the last 2 years. Sarah, my friend has a beer baby called Bernard, and I have am well into my 3rd trimester of Fried Chicken Bump. So hence the need to slim down, firm up and generally stop sitting about in pubs talking rubbish. So we have been forcing our prodigious guts into lycra and pounding the pavements of South East London.

So hopefully I’m going to chart my progress on the glorious internet, at least until I can’t be bothered any more or am blacking out too much to turn on my computer.

I’m in the second week of training, and the runs are embarrassingly short. But I’m still feeling a sense of achievement that I haven’t given up yet. At the moment I’m suffering from having little energy to do anything other than limp round my 3 mile route and go home to bed. Sarah and I have named this the Pudding Shock Stage (PSS) as it’s obviously caused by our pudding bodies going into shock at being forced to work. Sarah has run a marathon before and I’m reliably informed that after PSS, comes PS (Poo Stage) which is significantly messier. This occurs when you are able to run far enough to send your body into a full on “every body out!” style panic which causes explosive diarrhoea. I’m told this involves a lot of trying to run with bottom cheeks clenched and lamenting the decline of public lavatories. I do love the idea of my body staging a dirty protest after being forced to run!

So far being utterly exhausted has kept me out of the pub, so I’m seeing some lifestyle change. However I have also started eating like a pregnant woman so I’m not convinced that the muffin top situation is going to improve in any great hurry.