“Now I have another reason to hate Christmas.”

Kate Beringer – Gremlins (1984)

I’ve been sitting on a blog post draft for nearly 10 months now. In a nutshell, it was a massive whinge about how my running had suddenly gone to shit since I turned 40. It was me complaining about how I was finding it hard, lacked motivation, had picked up a injury that I couldn’t shake. It’s working title was ‘Fuck off February.’ I finally just took the ‘fuck it’ approach and published it in November.

What a 1st world problem snowflake I turned out to be. I write this in May June mid July late December where we are 428 weeks – I think, fuck knows – into an alleged half arsed ‘Lockdown.’ Now, I’m not going to get political in this post. I have some fairly strong political feelings but this is a running blog so won’t be boring your bollocks off with that. Plus, well, politics is a pretty emotive subject. Especially on social media. By emotive, I mean you post a political opinion, and someone from the opposite leaning tells you to fuck off.

So, I won’t going down that rabbit hole.

Anyway, February was terrible, have I mentioned that? I turned 40 at the beginning of it and honestly, I properly wasn’t arsed. I didn’t make a big thing of it, no big party or giant clown badges. I even managed to keep it quiet at work. Well, no-one asked. I know this makes me sound like a right anti-social bastard, but I’m not really. I have a good circle of close family and friends but I’m just not showy. I don’t go round broadcasting stuff and saying ‘look at me! look at me!’ I’m even shite at keeping this ‘look at me!’ blog up to date.

I wrote about how shit my February was here. This all seems like 1st world problems with hindsight, but I did chuckle at a re-read of my last paragraph:

‘I have two races (snigger) coming up. North Tyneside 10k in April, Sunderland Half Marathon in May. Unless something dramatic happens between now and then, I’m going to be in nowhere near any kind of shape to run them’

Because something dramatic did happen.

Half arsed Lockdown. The world shut down as we all were instructed to avoid humans we did and didn’t know in case we lurgy each other.

Luckily, or unluckily however you look at it, I had my ‘trusty’ treadmill. A battered and sweat covered Reebok number, well over a decade old now and still going. I spent the first two weeks isolated banging out daily 5ks on it whilst listening to some dubious song choices.

Two weeks later, I decided to venture out for my first ‘proper’ run. Let’s be honest fellow runners – take out the apocalyptic, economic, and health disaster of this whole clusterfuck – but early half arsed lockdown was quite an enjoyable time to run wasn’t it? Someone on Twitter told me off for saying that. But it’s true.

I was out every morning during April and it was bliss. No people, no cars, it was fanfuckingtastic. I ran on the road without the worry of ending up flung over a bonnet.

My Races got cancelled. The North Tyneside 10k was the first to go then the Sunderland City Half, and finally – after a lot of procrastinating and general pissing about – the GNR toppled.

I worked from home for 4 months, avoided Furlough and Redundancy, drank too much coffee, and grazed on too many things that make you fat. But boy did I run. Controversial off topic opinion – working from home is shit. Long term I worry about where it’s going to leave us as a species. Similar to the fat hover seat humans in Wal-E probably. When I was working from home, I did on average 25 miles LESS walking a week. That’s about 1,200 miles less a year. That’s not healthy. We’ll be fat as butter as a nation within 2 years.

Despite knowing it was going to be cancelled, I trained for the GNR anyway and ran it virtually, hitting a bizarre half marathon PB in the process. It helped keep me sane. In fact, running has kept me sane in 2020. In a year of restrictions, running has been my freedom. All of us who had running before lockdown were lucky to have it as a way of escape. Plus, it looks like many more have discovered it. For all the cancelled Parkruns and events, running is probably as healthier than its ever been. Weird.

So, what does 2021 have in store. Well, it’s the year Mad Max was set in. That’s all I’m saying. For me though, there’s allegedly at least a 10k and two Half Marathons. Will they go ahead? At this point, who knows. What I learnt in 2020 is that it doesn’t really matter. Running isn’t about medals and t-shirts, it’s about keeping your head and your body right. Here endeth the sermon.

So, make sure the strangest Christmas you’ll probably ever experience is a Merry one. Just think, for all the people you love that you can’t see this year, there are twice as many bell ends that you can now avoid. Every cloud and all that. Predictions for next year? 2021 can’t be shitter than 2020. JINX.