She is Nike Running Bitch, affectionately (or not) abbreviated to NRB, and she has been living in my iPhone and making my life miserable for eight long weeks now.
It all started when I signed up for the Angkor Wat half marathon, taking place in December. I've done a few organised races, from 10k to 50k, since the birth of Smaller Child, and my training has always veered wildly from the dilatory to the obsessive, dropping off a cliff when I got busy, bored, or hungover. This time I was determined it would be different. This time I would follow rules set by someone who (ostensibly) actually knew what they were doing. This time I would Meet My Potential. So I signed up to a program on my Nike running app. Little did I know at the time that what I was doing was essentially abdicating my free will for the next twelve weeks. My free will, my mornings, my evenings, my weekends, my sense of humour, my toenails...
At first, it was almost fun. "Get out there," NRB would chirp on a Monday morning. "Get out there and make it count!" "OK, lovely encouraging Nike app lady" I would think. "OK, I can do this! Yay! Running before work is FUN!!! And such a good use of time! Sleeping is for losers!!!" And I would dutifully pull on my trainers and, as instructed, get out there and make it count. "Boom!" she would cheer at the end of the week. "Well done for clocking more miles this week than last!". She even has a selection of guest stars to feed her hapless victim 'encouraging' soundbites. (And on that note, Ellie Goulding, what the ACTUAL fuck are you doing congratulating me on my weekly mileage? Don't you have better things to do/enough money already/any self-respect?)
As you can probably guess from the above, the beautiful symbiotic love-in between me and NRB did not last. It was all very well when I had a newbie's enthusiasm, a pair of shiny boxfresh trainers, and had to clock up "only" 30-ish kilometers a week. But two months later I am sitting in the middle of Peak Week (otherwise known as $%&*^@#%^&*!! Peak Week), which obliges me to run no fewer than 68 kilometers over the course of five days, and I am M I S E R A B L E. And, to be brutally honest, I hate NRB's guts right now. I hate her bouncy chummy enthusiasm. I hate her mid-afternoon alerts which remind me of the distance I have to run the following day, just at the time when I'm guiltily tucking into my (ahem) "emergency" Twix bar. I hate the little graph she produces to tell me when I've hit my targets... and of course when I haven't. And really, there are only so many times that someone can say "Boom!" before it triggers an overwhelming desire to punch them in the (virtual) face. I hate her. I hate her! IhateherIhateherIHATEHERIHATEHER!!!!
And, breathe.
Mr. H doesn't understand. He says, "If you loathe it, if you don't want to do it, then just stop!" But Mr. H is self-motivated, loves running, is miserable when he can't do it. Mr H is, quite frankly, a freak of nature, and he knows exactly where he can stuff his sparky get-up-and-go attitude to exercise. Also, in fairness, Mr. H has to live with me, which is probably a bit of a nightmare right now, and if I were in his shoes I imagine I would also be praying for NRB to meet a sticky end. But I just can't do it. I'm sooooooooooo nearly there. And, unfortunately, I am fundamentally - and actually to a fault - not a quitter. In fact, I am mule-stubborn, and the harder I get pushed, the more I dig my heels in. So the Bitch is here to stay, at least for a few more weeks.
Also, in complete honesty, I should admit that there have been some highs as well as lows on this journey of athletic totalitarianism. For sure, running five or six times a week has massively improved my fitness, as you would expect. I am also skinny in a way I wasn't even in my 20s, let alone post-babies, and a serendipitous side-effect of that is that I can eat whatever the hell I like (see above re the unfortunate Twix addiction, which I will have to kick once NRB has been despatched to the big running track in the sky). But, training or no training, ending up in third place in Singapore's biggest trail run last month was still a bit of a shock, and if you'd told me before I started that that would be the result of the fundamentalist approach to race preparation, I would have gladly done it a hundred times over.
I even got a trophy, and that's sat on my dresser as a daily reminder of diligence paying off. Who ever knew that working hard yielded results?! It is nothing short of a revolutionary concept. *Ahem*.
I've also (of course) managed to leverage the daily exercise to excuse some reasonably egregious credit-card bashing in various sportswear stores. After all, why buy only one pair of running shoes at once when you could buy three? Yes, I really did need that new pair of Lulu Lemon leggings. (And yes, for your information, I do understand perfectly the difference between "need" and "want".)
And, when all's said and done, I will get a weekend - a weekend without kids - in Cambodia. Yes, I will have to run 21 kilometers. Yes, I probably could have done that without subjecting myself to three months of NRB and Death By Training Schedule. But at least I will know, when I cross the finish line, that I will have done my best.
And perhaps, just perhaps, that means I won't ever feel the need to do it again
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