Loosing the Lockdown Lard

150 Miles For Accelerated Literacy

What with Lockdown and the absence of any races to focus on, not only has Guy got out of the habit of running, he has also put on rather more weight than even he would have expected over the festival period.

Consequently he has decided to grab the nettle firmly, get off his butt and run 150 miles before Easter and in the process raise much needed funds for Hothouse Theatre’s Accelerated Literacy Project.

Accelerated Literacy

click to donate

Part 1: Regaining the Mojo

If we were logical creatures, by which I mean something like Mr Spock* a la The Starship Enterprise ... ‘boldly going boldly where no man [or woman to give it a modern twist] has boldly gone boldly before ... boldly’ ... then a period of extended and enforced lockdown, would have been a gift for a fun runner looking to put some effort into getting a PB or two under their belt.

However, as we have all learnt over the last 10 months, we are not logical creatures. We are very emotional. So, although ‘Lockdown’ could mean anything we want it to mean (providing we are sufficiently well off to not be facing starvation, eviction for none payment of rent or life in a abusive relationship), the word actually, in the backlock up of the collective mind, means something more like ‘Locked up’ and as such becomes an emotional barrier to almost anything we want to do.

We are less like the fictional creation that is Mr Spock (who would have used the gift of so much free time to come up with a simple, but effective solution to Global Warming, World Poverty and the fundamental systems glitch that means that humans keep electing evolutionary sub-human officials to lead them through times of crisis) and more like Michael Palin’s equally fictional, but less impressive creation, Mr Gumby.

Consequently, my running mojo^ up and a went and did, just what a mojo is not suppose to up and do. It got up and buggered off.

Regaining your running mojo gets harder the longer you leave it. Or to be more precise, it gets harder the larger your stomach gets.

By the time I was tipping the scales at 16 stone (100 kg for you younger ones) it was clear, that if I was to avoid getting to the stage where the removal of some of the outer walls of the house might be required if I was ever to get outside again, some drastic mojo revitalisation plan was going to have to be put in place, pretty sharpish.

Under normal circumstances this would have happened naturally as the date of my next stupidly long race approached and I reached the ‘time critical’ point of my training which meant ‘get on with it now or face extreme embarrassment come race day, you bloody fool.’

However, during Lockdown, there are no race days.

And so, under extreme emotional pressure, I came up with a Plan!

Run a long way, over serval weeks, for a good cause and then, and this is the clincher, tell everyone your are going to do it so you sort of have to.

150 miles to raise money for Accelerated Literacy. By Easter.

Sorted!

The Running Mojo Recovery Plan

Stage 1. Weeks 1-4.

Week 1 ... do nothing ...

Week 2 ... repeat Week 1.

Week 3 ... repeat Week 2.

Week 4 With a mild form of panic that it is all a bit too late, setting in ... GET OFF YOUR INCREASINGLY FAT ARSE AND GET ON WITH IT!!


* For the generation that used the original Star Trek as an excuse not to do any home work on a Monday evening, Mr Spock, Dr McCoy and the good Captain James T. were, after Blue Peter and the occasional Sunday debate between The Monty Python Team and Malcolm Muggeridge about the place of Life of Brian in the Scriptures, our only exposure to morality and philosophy and other such stuff. As such, Capt Kirk et al had a profound affect on the developing young minds of the generation that I grew up in. As such the cast of this rather dated T. V. show remain a solid bench mark of all things deep.

^Coming from the afore mentioned Star Trek generation, a mojo to me was always a kind of cheap sweet, wrapped in paper that it was almost impossible to remove, that you only got when you didn’t have enough pennies to buy something better. They were coloured to make it look like they had been made from fruit, by some mysterious process of alchemy, and therefore had a sense of being actually good for you. It is unlikely that any actual fruit went into them, and the health benefits of the mojo on the generation that grew up eating them, is probably only now coming home to roost.

It is not that kind of mojo I am talking about here.

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150 Miles For Accelerated Literacy

 What with Lockdown and the absence of any races to focus on, not only has Guy got out of the habit of running, he has also put on rather more weight than even he would have expected over the festival period.

Consequently he has decided to grab the nettle firmly, get off his butt and run 150 miles before Easter and in the process raise much needed funds for Hothouse Theatre’s Accelerated Literacy Project.

Accelerated Literacy

click to donate

Oh My Nottz is a HotHouse Theatre production. Co. No. 6505843 Charity No. 1154523. Tel 07535138506 email guy@hothousetheatre.com website www.hothousetheatre.com
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