28 Days of Pain - Day 24

By Jamie Hill

Reasons to lose weight #478 - When you're the same height standing up as lying down.

I hate rain. Look at me. I really hate rain.

That's me after my run this morning. I was wearing a hoodie on top of that T-shirt but it was so wet that every part me of got water-logged. It would be funny if it was someone else.

In that picture I look like a fat wet blob. God, I hate being fat (you might have noticed that already).

It's my fault really. I said yesterday that this 28 Days of Pain has actually become quite pleasurable. Someone was listening obviously as today the rain decided to bring the pain.

I managed my five kilometres in rain that was, at times, torrential. I just kept going and going. Hating every second.

Rain brings a hell of a lot of other problems for the cross country runner. First of all there's the mud. You have to constantly be looking where you're running to dodge slippy bits and puddles.

Then there's the visibility. Basically the rain is all you can see. I was wearing a hoodie but the hood kept slipping over my eyes. So for a portion of my run I had to hold it in place. This made it look like I was doing an 'I'm a little teapot' dance as I was running. I wasn't. I finally worked out that with some nifty folding I could get my hoodie to stay out of my eyes for 500 metres at a time. That improved things.

For some reason my trackie bottoms also kept threatening to fall down. I think because they were waterlogged as well. There was one point where if someone else was there they would have seen me doing a teapot impression with my trousers down below my bum as I ran.

Luckily for me then that the rain meant I had the whole common to myself otherwise I might have been done for indecent exposure.

The run also seemed to last forever. And by the final two kilometres I was already fed up to the back teeth with it.

For a runner, a little bit of rain, light drizzle and the like, can be quite pleasurable. It cools you down as you run. But when the rain is torrential it becomes a soggy mess of a run that you simply want to end.

I've only got a few days to go but I'm dreading it. By the next run on Wednesday I'll probably be used to the rain so on Friday it'll probably blizzard. By the time Saturday comes with its 10,000 metre challenge it'll be a full scale hurricane.

Saying all that though the run wasn't so bad physically for me. My recovery time seems to have gone down even more and I feel fitter. I could have definitely run a bit further this morning if it wasn't for that damned rain.

For previous entries and for the rules of the challenge visit http://www.theocelot.co.uk