Author: Nat Goodlad

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Dry Dry January #4: Done

I fully understand that it won’t seem like a lot to some people. There are those that, physically, can do a lot more than I’m capable of right now and, rightfully, can feel good about themselves for it.

But, as I sit here drinking the last few sips of January-mandated water, I can’t help but feel a little bit happy with what I’ve done this month.

Let’s be clear – there could have been improvements. I could have stuck with the medicine ball work, my diet could have been a bit better – but the main idea behind this month was to get back into running and to really start chipping away at my times having been so pedestrian about it at the back end of last year.

A slow start to the week

Given that the South East was handed its bi-yearly douse of snow last week, and that all of that white stuff had frozen over by Monday morning, there was no chance I was going outside in that. I didn’t even risk going to work (much to the annoyance of some).

That meant by the time Tuesday came ar0und, I’d had an extra day of rest. My body didn’t seem to like that (???) and so Tuesday ended up being by far the worst run of the month. I managed to stumble along the first 3km before giving in and walking the last two. Weirdly, I was only about six minutes behind the first running time I recorded in the month, so props to that first 3km for carrying a lot of the weight there.

Having then needed a couple more days to soothe my legs from a pain I haven’t had for about eight months now, I went out again on Friday, tackling the same uphill route that had challenged me earlier in the week.

It wasn’t comfortable or pretty, but I did get around this time, which was the only aim for that run. Get it done by any means necessary.

Sprint finish

That meant that I had just one more day to fit in the last run of the month (as Saturday is just a no-go for anything like that).

After waking up and having to force myself out the door, I actually felt quite good once I got going – which is rare. For those of you reading that also run, you know that feeling where time actually seems to be going by quickly while you’re doing it? I might have just made that up, but I got that feeling.

By the end of it, it felt like I was sprinting, and it’s a good thing I did because it landed me my best time of the month at 32:04 – down from the 38.59 I started January with.

It felt disgusting initially, but when the blood-flow returned to my head and I started to think rationally, I realised I’d never set out to cut anything like that off – maybe five minutes at the absolute most. Running-wise, I definitely over-achieved – but it’s given me more motivation than I already had to carry on and achieve more going forward.

That’s what progress looks like, right?

The rest of it

I am slightly annoyed about the other exercises than I had planned to do in-between. However, when I planned this month out, I had no idea that I’d be working in between too as that all happened so fast. And I had no idea I’d be getting up at 4.30 am in order to get to work.

It sounds like a shoddy excuse, but I was just a lot more tired than I’d expected to be for those middle bits. There will be a point in the future where I’ll just have to suck it up, but for a first month of getting back into the swing of this I don’t think it’s the end of the world to have dropped it.

The next biggest thing after the running for me was the drinks. I’m very surprised I never gave in with that to be honest (a reminder: it was one coffee in the morning as soon as I wake up, and then nothing but water afterwards).

The hardest bit hasn’t even been fizzy drinks as I thought it would be – it was basic stuff like not having juice, squash, etc – anything with actual flavour.

They’ll definitely be coming back in from tomorrow, but fizzy and alcohol will stay on strict moderation for sure. I’m shocked at how much I haven’t missed them.

What’s next?

You haven’t completely escaped running and exercise posts – sorry. I plan on upping the game in terms of that next month.

I won’t be posting it as a series like I have been this month (at least I don’t plan to. Let me know if you’d like that?) and I want to start putting some different stuff on here anyway. I’ve had a lot of football suggestions, and other suggestions are more than welcome too.

Hope you’ve enjoyed following along with this. I’ve not enjoyed partaking in it, although the writing bit after has been quite nice.

Also, well done for getting through January, an absolute shithouse of a month. We’re 1/12 of the way there. Yay.

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Dry Dry January #3: Catch-up

I even promised myself this time that the next thing I put up on this damn website would not be about running. This isn’t a running blog and nor will it ever turn into a running blog (as much as I suspect some of you would like it to for the sake of old times).

This time, though, I’ve genuinely found that I’ve forgotten/did not write down anywhere all of the suggestions for content that I was given when I first mooted the idea of subjecting you all to this a few months ago. I promise to myself and to all of you this time that there will be some variation soon. However, you did miss out on this last week (I was the one that had to go through it so you’re the lucky ones in more ways than one), so now you can have two helpings of Dry Dry January all rolled into one.

The week you missed

I don’t think I’d got around to mentioning before this week that I’d decided to just do three lots of 5km every week rather than following an app or whatever – so that’s what I’m doing now.

I think one of my main problems with running, particularly in the fads I’ve had of it in the last couple of years, has been accepting being comfortable as an effective way of doing it. Sometimes that’s fine, for example if you’re only doing it as a means of getting out the house and getting some fresh air. This time, though, I’m actually doing it to try and get fitter and get back to the stage I was at almost six years ago.

On the Monday of this week, I’d just had my first shift at my new job – one that involves getting up at 4.30am (something I’m sure I’ll be complaining about a lot in future blogs) – and this involves being on my feet a lot and doing plenty of walking around. My phone told me I’d already walked more than 5km at work before I started this run, but I tried to ignore it and instead powered through the first 2km (pretty much all uphill) in 13-and-a-half minutes. Error.

Stumbled and suffered through the rest of it, while still setting a decent time by way of the first 2km, and as such both of my times fell behind again on Wednesday and Friday of that week.

While that’s annoying, it doesn’t actually matter – what matters is I’m getting out and doing it, and still knocking seconds off my times from the first week.

The week just passed

Hooo boy, this week was good.

Before everyone starts shouting at me, I KNOW there are much better times out there, and I KNOW there are people that don’t feel like their lungs are caving in at the end of a 5km run, but this week was even enough to make me consider stopping the self-deprecating comments.

This was the week where I decided that if this was going to be worth it and not just something I write about for a month and then give up on, then I really needed to push it – and Monday was a good start by knocking almost two minutes off what I had done the previous Friday.

I actually felt good after I had finished (sort of, anyway) and knew that, really, there were bits where I could’ve maintained a previous pace rather than slowing down.

So, that’s what I did on Wednesday, and I knocked off over another minute. And then on Friday, another 35-odd seconds.

I’m now at 32:25 as a best score for the year so far, which really is about where I wanted to be by the end of this silly experiment rather than three quarters of the way through. It also means that since the first time recorded of 38:59, I’ve now chopped off roughly seven minutes (I’ve rounded that up, obviously) in just three weeks. Madness.

The other bits

The race around Iceland is heating up.

I’ve now firmly left Reykjavik and have crossed over the first fjord onto another peninsula, close to the enormous port and industry centre named Grundartangi.

According to the map, I’m a little bit behind the pace that I should be doing given the distance and the time I’ve given myself to do it, but that should all catch up later in the year when I start doing longer distances.

It also says that my nearest competitor at the moment is a man by the name of Jason Burns. He’s 1.3km ahead of me. I’m coming, Jason.

The less said about the medicine ball the better. I know that running isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to fitness. That’s not to say it’s pointless, like many Instagram and TikTok fitness gurus will try to tell you, but supplementing it with something else is important.

I need to find something else. The medicine ball is boring.

I did feel quite annoyed with myself for missing the second day of it on the week you missed, but when it got to the next day I was meant to do it and I still didn’t have the motivation, I guessed it probably wasn’t working for me.

So, I bought one of these.

I think it’s fairly self-explanatory, but just in case – it’s all done in the press-up position, and the position of the handles changes what muscles you work.

While I haven’t had a proper go yet, I’ve done a couple of each and you can definitely feel the change on each one. I’ll start using it from next week as a replacement for the ball.

Diet-wise, I think I’m doing alright. I don’t really know as my only firm commitments with the diet side of this were with drinks, and I’ve stuck to them all so far. I haven’t really missed alcohol, which I expected, and although I’d really like a Dr Pepper at some point, I’ve not been that fussed about any of the other fizzy stuff.

The only thing I’ve found slightly difficult is fully restricting it to all water and one coffee in the morning (trust me, I would not wake up at 4.30 without one). That’s meant no squash or juice or whatever, which has been a bit meh at times when you just want something that doesn’t taste of nothing.

Overall, though, I’d say the entire experiment is going well. It’s definitely tiring (more so as I never planned to be working while I was doing this) and I would certainly say I’m stretching my comfort zones more than I’m used to.

With one more week to go, it’s time to start thinking about whether I want to do any challenges for February. If you have any ideas, tell me. I’ll do almost anything if I can write and whinge about it on a blog.

Well done for nearly getting through January. It’s been shit and the world is still a shit place, but we’re getting there. Keep going. See you again.

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Hard work pays off

Just a quick one, yeah? A little update of sorts.

I’ve been meaning to write something else on here that wasn’t about running because, you know, ✨ varied content✨. However, each day I’ve just decided that, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered so left it.

I will try and do that soon, and I’ll do another Dry Dry January update at the weekend as I’m aware I missed one and I’m sure you’re all devastated by that (it’s going well though, thanks for asking).

Those of you who know me and haven’t just stumbled across this from the three places I share it (most of which are full of people I know anyway…), will remember that back in 2017 I started a journalism course in London. You may also remember that, while I enjoyed it, in the end it didn’t go to plan and I didn’t pass, but still got lucky enough to get a job in the industry. And you may also remember that a pandemic happened and I now no longer have that job in the industry.

WELL, phase one of the return has now been passed, I’m pleased to report. Towards the end of last year I decided I wanted to go back and re-do the course, this time passing and succeeding on merit rather than relying on luck. That, though, meant raising a significant sum of money, which therefore meant I needed a job.

I spent the last two months of that shit show we called 2020 grafting in a warehouse, doing 60 hours a week, to get the majority of it. Although the people I worked with were fine, and I got some cool uniform and memorabilia out of it, I couldn’t have hated every second more. That came to an end just before Christmas, and now I’m working in a supermarket to get the last few hundred pounds that I need.

The key point to this, though, is that I submitted my application to return to the course on Sunday afternoon, and yesterday evening I heard that I’d been accepted to go on without the need for an interview.

The interview part when I did it in 2017 (bare in mind I was 18-years-old, had only ever had two interviews in my life and this course was not designed for people that age) was the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve ever done in my life. Though I have no doubt I’d have been fine with it four years later, to have to not do it is a big weight off my shoulders and finally knowing what I’m going to be doing come the end of the year is a major relief.

There were mistakes, and distractions, last time around, but I’m determined to make this one a far different experience to the one I had four years ago. The hard graft in that warehouse so that I could get a second chance at following this dream was definitely worth it. Now I need to make sure I can continue that once the course comes around.

Anyway, hope you’re all doing good. Let me know if not – if you want to – and we can talk. See you again.

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Dry Dry January #2: A couple of tweaks

I had actually planned to write something else before doing this, but such is my extremely hectic schedule at the moment, I lost complete track of time and just never bothered doing it.

It means nothing at this point other than there are two articles in the same series next to each other, which annoys my brain slightly, but the promise of weekly updates on my torture ended up overruling.

As clearly stated in the title, I’ve made a couple of tweaks to the rules/conditions I set out last week and now you can hear all about them below.

Not following a programme

Last time, I said I would pick up one of my old running programmes from the back end of last year about halfway through and see it to the finish again.

But because I find that boring and not particularly challenging seeing as I’ve done it before, I decided instead to run 5km three times a week and knock something off my time with each run.

That might not sound particularly enthralling either, but in my head at least it’s a far greater challenge, especially as I’ve now made it annoyingly hard for myself by doing quite well in the first week.

My goal for the first run was to do it in under 40 minutes, which I did fairly comfortably in the end. However, I didn’t expect to have knocked off three minutes by the end of the week.

A new work schedule in week two and beyond might make this a bit more difficult to follow, but I think sticking to 5km is going to be the way forward for now.

Something to keep me going

As the rules set out only cover January, and the whole body and fitness issues are going to take considerably more than a month to deal with, I needed something to aim towards long-term too.

Someone I follow on Instagram who is a keen runner had been doing these online challenges throughout Lockdown 2.0 and I particularly noticed that the medals he got after each one were really nice.

I had a look and saw there was an Icelandic themed event, and given my weird soft spot for Nordic countries, particularly Iceland, I thought I’d have a go at that one.

It’s basically a virtual race around the ring road of Iceland, logging each run I do as I go along. At over 1,300km, I decided it’d probably take me most of the year to do that, so hopefully by Christmas 2021 I’ll have a shiny medal to ease the pain of the blisters on my feet from running a stupid number of miles.

How’s the rest of it going?

The rest of the rules centred around food/drink and sleep. One of those is going fairly well, and the other not so much.

On the drinks front, I’m finding it pretty easy – one coffee to aid with the waking up process, and nothing but water after that. I don’t drink alcohol much at home anyway and I’ve only really missed Dr Pepper from the others.

Food started well but has dropped off a little bit. I’m hoping that getting back to work next week will put me in a bit more of a routine with that (although it never exactly stopped me before). If anyone can recommend healthier things to eat when I don’t really need to eat anything then I’m all ears.

Sleep hasn’t gone too well. I set the Bedtime thing on my phone to tell me to go to sleep by 11pm every night and I think I managed it once. I’m pretty certain that will change by next week, though.

Overall, I’m happy with the first week. I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything in terms of weight, which I’m not worried about after only one week. However, I do feel like it’s done me good mentally and that’s as good as anything given everything that is going on at the moment.

The most challenging part of week two is going to be adding work into the equation, I think, but I’m confident I can stick at it.

I haven’t got a choice to, really, otherwise I’ll have nothing to write about on here…

Enjoy your week – stay safe and stay sane.

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Dry Dry January #1: And so it begins

That was all a bit of a train wreck, wasn’t it? The year from hell is finally over, and we can finally start to look forw… oh, another lockdown is imminent? FIVE tiers? In a three-tier system? How does that even…?

Okay, so 2021 isn’t getting off to the best start either. Personally, that’s not what I really need. Like almost everyone, my last year was literally hand-crafted by the Devil himself and I’m sure he was there giggling in the corner as I had to live through five months of furlough, redundancy from a job I loved, temporary jobs, countless applications and cover letters, all while not being able to see my mates.

Sounds like a carbon copy of a lot of people’s 2020, I know. Therefore, I’m going to shut up about it now and look forward to… putting myself through absolute hell again for the sake of personal challenge. Great.

Dry Dry January

One thing that did make 2020 considerably less terrible was that I got back into running. When I combined that with going to the gym once it re-opened, I found that all of my lockdown weight quickly receded – funny that.

The last temp job I had, though, was 12 hour shifts for five days a week, which isn’t really conducive to wanting to exercise five days a week too. Therefore, I had to sack it off for a while.

That was a shame because, for once, it had actually got to the point where I was enjoying it. I loved the feeling of achieving a goal I had set myself, like running 5km for the first time in over two years, or running for an hour straight. I want to get back to that, but this time I’m setting a more difficult challenge.

Dry January is probably something you’re familiar with – it’s a charity thing where people give up alcohol for one month and it generally sees them save money and feel healthier come the end of it.

I personally don’t drink too much alcohol anyway, particularly not at home (although many months trapped inside did its best to test that). So, I thought I’d make my already most dreaded month even more torturous by adding in some additional rules – and adding an extra ‘Dry’ into the name of it to emphasise that it’s more than just the alcohol, and so I could use the ‘Dry Dry Desert’ logo from Mario Kart as the main picture.

The rules

EXERCISE

Originally I’d planned to put the gym back into this, but seeing as that’s now not allowed, I’ll have to make do with stealing the medicine ball my dad got for Christmas. I’ve already tried a 15 minute session once and it nearly killed me, so that can go in on Tuesdays and Thursdays to break up the monotony of running.

Three runs a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) doing whatever the 10k training app tells me to do. I finished all the sessions on that before my last job but seeing as I haven’t done any running since then, I’ll start about halfway through and see how it goes.

DIET

This is the bigger issue for me. Exercise has never been much of a problem but the stuff I consume between that has always ruined it.

As well as no alcohol, I’ll be banning fizzy drinks and anything that isn’t water (apart from one coffee in the morning so that I can actually do the rest of the day).

Five a day+ is also an obvious one, and effectively just making sure I don’t eat anything I don’t need to.

SLEEP

Even though I hate doing it, I always find I’m more productive when I wake up early. So, 6.30am every day for a month – let’s see how that goes.

What do I want from it?

Mostly just to feel healthier. I find that when I start to feel healthier, I’m more motivated to keep it going, so maybe the things that I practice in January can be extended further into the year when things like daylight will also make them easier.

The obvious one, too, is to lose weight. I lost a bit in summer and autumn 2020, but I’m still not mad on how I look so I need to carry on working on that as well.

I won’t update on here every day about how it’s going because that’s painfully boring for you all (as I’m sure this whole article detailing it has been), but I’ll draw something up every week or so with what’s been happening, how many apples I’ve eaten, how many times I’ve fallen in the canal on a run, etc.

Hopefully 2021 is better for everyone. It certainly can’t be much worse than the last one. Not until Tier 15 becomes a reality, anyway.

I don’t know what I’ll be posting next. As with before, I haven’t really thought about it. We’ll see if anything interesting happens.

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What the hell are you doing?

‘What the hell are you doing?’ is likely what the cat was thinking when I picked him up and started taking photos of us like in the main picture. It might also be what you’re thinking having seen said photo attached to a blog post that also has my name on it.

Yep, it’s come to this. I suppose after four-and-a-half years of writing things on the internet a personal blog was a natural progression, as much as I previously tried to avoid it. Here we are, though. Lockdown after lockdown has finally rendered me bored enough to take the plunge and actually try this out.

It’s not entirely down to that – I do actually enjoy writing. I’ve been doing enough of it and it was actually my full-time job for a year-and-a-half pre-pandemic. You never know, this could eventually turn into something like that as well, but we’ll decide that once the one-year subscription I bought for this domain expires.

I figured that if I want to get back into writing full-time, I have to be seen to be writing quite a lot of the time while I’m sat at home. Therefore, that’s why I’m here – to share with you all (maybe not all) the things that you don’t know (or maybe do know) about me, while hopefully making it entertaining and a worthwhile intrusion into your day.

Being an avid football sufferer, there is likely to be a fair amount of content on the sport I have such a love-hate relationship with. However (and for those of you know me, this is where the big twist comes in) that’s not ALL there will be!

My overall aim is to show I’m not just a creator of football sentences, but that I can also do it with other topics like running, health (both physical and mental), lifestyle and all manner of other things that pique my interest.

If I do something different, I’ll try and write it down on here. If I go anywhere exotic (given current restrictions, Southend is probably as exotic as it’ll get) I’ll whack something up. Basically, it’ll be like me having a YouTube vlog channel without having to spend all of my furlough money on a worthwhile camera and an overpriced microphone.

Hopefully you enjoy reading all of the stuff I put on here as well. If you don’t, be nice about it and move on quietly. If you do, share it about and show your friends and see whether they like it too.

That’s enough for the extended introduction. I’m off to plan what the first actual post is going to be about because I still have no idea.

Until then, stay safe, keep two metres apart from strangers and wash your damn hands.