Do you ever measure your inches?

“Only when I’m auditioning for a porn movie” my client replied.

Note to self: engage brain before mouth and never EVER ask a male client about his inches J

So after he’d picked me up off the prom for laughing so hard, we of course talked about measuring weight loss and change in body shape by measuring inches rather than looking at the scales.

Obsessive measuring

The world seems obsessed with measuring and I for one quite enjoy it, when the measures are going in the right direction of course.

Last night I was chatting to Martyn, another walk2run coach, and he measures most of his runs in kilometres, using minutes per kilometre to measure pace. I usually work in miles. How many miles have I run, what was my minute mile pace. But I can also do kilometres per hour for treadmill runs, or minutes per kilometre for 5k runs. Then there are races and personal bests or records (PBs or PRs). What’s your 5k PB? How many hours minutes and seconds does it take you to run a marathon? Seconds are important. I once ran a 50k trail race in 5 hours, no minutes, and ONE SECOND! Hang on though, is that Chip time or Gun time? How many seconds did it take you to cross the start line?

By the way, who won? If you’re a non-runner or you’ve been to a few school sport’s days, you will assume this is a simple question to answer.

Well let me enlighten you. 

Firstly, are you male or female? If you’re very lucky and very quick, you could be the actual winner. I mean you actually came first. You could be a senior man in a mixed race who crossed the line before anyone else. Or you could be first female. Or you could be first male or female in your age group. If you’re a 78 year old lady who finishes an hour after that first senior male crosses the line, you may legitimately say that you beat him, (once your time is adjusted for your age gradings).

And so on.

Countless ways to win

There’s a real upside to all this measuring  because - depending what you’re measuring - in running, there are countless ways to win. You can even win by coming last.  Some of the drills we do in Walk2Run are like that, slowest is best. The first really will be last and the last will be first!

I enjoy it as much as the next runner, but I must admit that I enjoy running ‘naked’ even more.  That’s running with no watch, no time limit, and no regard for the miles, kilometres, minutes or seconds. I take food, money, water, my thoughts and my eyes and I simply enjoy a day out adventuring.

Measureless Joy. 

Come and run with us, it might just change your life