Today I have a guest post from Bee – please give her the pep talk she badly needs!

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Hey guys. It’s Bee here. I know what you’re thinking, go back to your own blog right?

I basically just wanted to write this post because I need a kind of pep talk from you all about this new fitness journey I am about to embark on. I know this isn’t really the place to do it, seeing as I wouldn’t exactly call this a pro running blog, but I thought you could help me anyway.

So when I was young and naive, all those years ago when I was about to start uni, bright eyed and bushy tailed and about two stone lighter than I am now, I decided optimistically that I would run a marathon before uni was out. Then a couple of months ago, when I was starting my Major Project (dissertation for those who basically did a real academic course with exams and stuff) a thought popped into my head.

“Oh, crap. Got to do that marathon. Eh. It will be fine.” View Post

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As you know, last September I started running.

At first it was really tough. I was following a ‘couch to 5k’ app on my phone and it began with running for one minute, walking for a minute and a half, and repeating this eight times. After running for a whole minute I felt like I really might actually die, right there on the street.

I persevered though, to the point where I could run for 25 minutes without stopping. I say run, it was more of a bouncy walk, me just ricocheting off the pavement between steps, and in this 25 minutes we only managed to cover just under 3k. Not exactly a land speed record. I had stopped turning quite as beetroot red as in the early days though. You would think that by this point, after four months of practising, that I would have reached a point at which I got some tiny bit of pleasure out of it.

I did not. View Post

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I ran for 20 minutes.

I didn’t stop, or even walk for a bit when no one was looking. I went slowly, but I ran the whole way. This might not seem like a massive thing to some people, but this is by far the furthest I have ever run non-stop in my whole life. Ever. (I have never been what you’d call ‘sporty’).

Here I am just after I finished. See how pleased I am? So buzzing with enthusiasm am I now that I am even adding ‘run a 5k’ to my list of 40 things to do before I’m 40. (If I commit it to virtual paper then I can’t back out.) View Post

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This week has been my third week of bronchitis and despite feeling a lot better in myself I am definitely not quite up to my usual speed. On Wednesday I went out for a walk for half an hour, wheezing like an old man enjoying his morning pipe, and when I got home accidentally fell asleep for an hour and a half. Not ideal when you are meant to be working.

It means as well that running has had to be put on hold. I did try the ‘man up and get on with it approach’ last week but after playing netball twice on the Monday and then running on the Tuesday I felt so dreadful on Wednesday that I had to resign myself to taking things easy. I felt bad about it, like I was cheating, but Boyfriend gave me a stern look so I knew I had to behave.

I was especially sad though as it means I have only been able to use my new trainers once so far and I had been so looking forward to using them and looking super cool. View Post

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