Tag: run/walk

Cuba – Conqueror Virtual Challenge

Jess Guth2 Comments

As promised, here is some more detail about the virtual challenge I chose. There were a few I looked at. The Berlin Wall was tempting but short, there’s a Lord of the Rings one, an Avengers one… but the one that caught my eye was Cuba – a 70 ish mile virtual journey from Santiago to Havana. It caught my eye for several reasons. In 2011 Kath and I went to Cuba and the trip we did was sort of that route in reverse. I thought it would be a nice way to remember that adventure and reflect on how much things have changed and how much they are still the same. I thought having a tangible excuse to spend time with those memories would be nice. It also feels like I want Cuba in my thoughts at the moment. Our god daughter and her brother are half Cuban, one of our best friends is Cuban. I don’t know anywhere near enough about how things currently are in Cuba because there is so little news coverage that really provides any detail but it sounds horrendous. From the news I do see, little help seems to be getting through, blackouts continue as the energy crisis worsens, there are critical food shortages as well as a lack of medicines and basic necessities. Add earthquakes and hurricanes and a government responding badly and US sanctions making everything even more difficult and you have what the UN last week called a worsening humanitarian crisis. And I can do nothing really. What I can do is keep Cuba and the Cuban people in my thoughts. I can look for ways to support humanitarian efforts, I can keep developing legal curricula that focus on the importance of international law so that the next generations do better. I can keep thinking about what I can do. It’s almost nothing, it’s nowhere near enough and I absolutely realise that me doing the challenge is really just self indulgent crap. But for me it is also away to keep my privileged perfect life in perspective, to remember that when I can, I need to do something, however small and insignificant that something is. It has to be better than nothing. It has to.

So the challenge works using an App. In the App you have your profile where you find a list of your challenges (yes there are monsters who do more than one at once). You can add distances manually or you can connect your app of choice – I have connected Strava so I don’t have to remember to upload. You can count any sport where you cover distance and apparently you can also convert things like weight training or yoga – not sure how, not something I am interested in doing. The challenge itself basically opens on a map. In my case it popped me on the map on the edge of Santiago De Cuba and as I clock up my miles here in West Yorkshire, I move along the map in Santiago de Cuba. At certain points I unlock what are called rewards. First I got a postcard. A postcard appears to be a little essay about the place. Some history and local info. I haven’t fact checked it but nothing seemed obviously incorrect when I read it – perhaps just a bit sanitised for tourists. That’s how far I’d got after my first run on Monday.

Next I ‘unlocked’ a Local Spot – Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca. The App gives me a bit of information and some pictures – the pictures were instantly familiar. And here the reflections begin. By the time we got to Santiago De Cuba on our trip, Kath and I were pretty fed up with the stupidity of most of our tour group (why oh why did we think we could do group travel, we hate people) so when we got to the Castle we kept ourselves to ourselves and just people watched. Then we saw the quickest and most spectacular sunset I have ever seen. It makes sense when you know, but it had never occurred to me that sunsets vary in the time it takes for the sun to dip behind to horizon based on where you are in relation to the equator. So I am used to slow lingering sunsets that go on for a while – because, hello northern Europe but not so much in the Caribbean – the sun just sort of drops out of the sky. No long lingering evening watching the sun slowly make its way through the sky – just a sort of constant steady decent down past the horizon. Spectacular. Anyway, it was a lovely evening and after the sunset went for a nice meal and I learned that when there are enough mosquitos just sitting next to Kath isn’t enough to keep me safe, I actually had to use repellent. No seriously, usually when I am with Kath, I don’t get bites at all, she does. Anyway, I wonder what Santiago is like now. I am sure the sunsets are as spectacular as ever, but what will the sun rise to? Does each new day bring hope or just more suffering? And as I was looking at the app, reading the information and viewing the pictures they have, I wondered if I could get fit enough to do something outrageous again, something that people might actually pay money to support or see me do. What if I could work towards something that could help just a tiny little bit. So maybe that’s something I could do. Maybe. Anyway, here are two 2011 photos from my 2026 virtual starting point for this journey.

Santiago de Cuba
Santiago sunset 2

I only did 2 miles today. I gave myself a month to do this challenge and I am now behind pace but that really doesn’t matter. I’ll catch up eventually. I also ‘unlocked’ a Local Interest spot. Again, information and some pictures from the App. I feel a little bit like I am reading a travel guide, and I guess in some ways I am. I am only just over 7km in. The app lets you see at a glance how far you have come (I think you can set it to miles or km, I’m on km at the moment) and how many days you have done/have left. You set the time goal when you set up the challenge – you can change it though. The App also gives you the option to view the area you are in in Street View – but of course this is Cuba. To my delight there is no official Google Street View in Cuba. A little bit of the world that doesn’t exist in Google. That feels perfect to me in this always online world. I was thinking back to 2011 when we took our trip. I had just handed in my PhD, I was enjoying my teaching and my writing, the thought of running hadn’t crossed my mind, in many ways the world was simpler then. But so much is also still the same. I don’t really feel any different – a little more cynical maybe, a little creakier and stiffer and possibly a little more unfuckwithable and less tolerant of bullshit.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a running blog. So today, after work, when the temptation to just fall face first onto the bed and whimper was almost overwhelming, I instead marched a mile uphill and then jogged a mile back down – no run/walk intervals as such unless you take one long mile slog uphill and an ok but slow plod down the hill as a giant walk/run interval. My legs were not a fan of uphill – my calf muscles were proper grumpy with that and then running down everything was a bit bemused that I wasn’t stopping after 30 second. I really wanted to stop and walk – but come on – it’s downhill. So I didn’t stop, because sometimes I can make my brain behave and I can think things like – ‘you can do this, you are good at hard, you’re breathing fine, no that didn’t hurt, oh look rabbit. And all is fine.

So, virtually I am on a random road in Santiago de Cuba and in reality I am trying to function in a world that has gone insane, in a world where I am safe and comfortable and oh so privileged simply because of where I was born and chose to live. The virtual challenge is making me want to run, it’s making me want to unlock the next ‘reward’ and move through Cuba because I want to know where this will take me, what ideas I might have, what rabbit holes (not literally I hope, Kath did that once) I will go down and whether in all of that there is anything I can do that can help make the world a better place.

How do you build consistency?

Jess GuthLeave a comment
Blossom in our Garden

Consistency. The mythical thing that will make everything fall into place and become joyful and easy… . Apparently. I spend enough time scrolling on social media to have read several idiotic takes on consistency and on how habit not motivation will build consistency. And I get it. I remember (vaguely) a short period of time where running was just something we did. We didn’t really think about doing it, we just did. It wasn’t a decision to make. But that time was brief and also, it might be fictional. Perhaps it was never like that. Perhaps getting out the door has always been the hardest part of running. My brain is good at making shit up and maybe remembering a time, whether it actually existed or not, where getting out to run was easy, isn’t a bad thing.

Anyway, there I was scrolling like we all know we shouldn’t and the claims about how to get your shit together were just getting more and more outrageous. Advice that seemed to boil down do ‘you just need to be disciplined and get up at 4am and exercise and drink your electrolyte infused water and eat the right macros, take the most expensive supplements on the market and here’s some guidance on what to say so you’re not seen as weak at work and then here’s your evening relaxation and skin care routine and and … I am exhausted and bemused just seeing the posts, never mind reading or engaging with any of it. It does however bring me back to a question – how do normal people get their shit together? Like not 4am runs every morning and mapped out to the second daily routines (It is now 19.02, time to relax for precisely 19 minutes) but normal. Normal as in, my job can be a bit random, sometimes the cat pukes on the bed at 3am throwing everything into chaos, or I was so busy that I am both completely dehydrated because I didn’t drink anything and desperate for a pee because I haven’t had time for a toilet stop or I am not going to the gym for love nor money today because – ew people or the world feels wrong and I need to hide under a blanket and cry. That sort of normal. Which reading it back might not in fact be normal. What I mean is, how, in all the chaos that is normal life and without the desire or will power to be really regimented, how do you build consistency? How do you get to habit, to where the brain just assumes you’re going to the gym or for a run so you don’t have to do battle with yourself each time? How do you get motivated enough to get past the need for motivation?

I know, if I could really figure that out and bottle it, I could stop with the academic nonsense and retire ungracefully. I don’t think there is just one answer though. I read a post that suggested you set an alarm with a motivational quote to get you up and out of bed – yeah that will elicit a sleepy string of expletives and not much else while I turn off the alarm, turn over and go straight back to sleep. Another post suggested sleeping in your gear. Yeah – the only time I will sleep in a sports bra is if I am too exhausted after a run to attempt getting out of it. Other suggestions included telling yourself you can come back if you still really don’t want to be out after ten minutes. That also doesn’t work because that is a given for me. If I am miserable I won’t force myself to push through. I am too old for that shit. Hard – sure. Miserable, nope. More suggestions – same time each day for exercise of some description – hello chaotic schedule. That might work if I went really early in the morning but anyone who has met me will know that that will go wrong very very quickly. If I don’t get 8 hours sleep a night for a period of time, armageddon will ensue. I am being negative. Sorry. Of course I will eventually (and into the summer it’s easier) get up early more consistently and run after work more consistently and just the line between doing hard and being miserable will move so I will do more. I know this. I just find all the social media stuff annoying and unhelpful because none of it strikes me as realistic but I also can’t quite shake myself free of the expectations that my ducks should be more in a row and I should be able to be more disciplined. (I know! I’m paying for therapy, I am working on the people pleasing good girl thing)

Anyway, given that I am too old to take the influencers seriously and too intelligent to believe the nonsense around fitness and health and wellbeing and getting your shit together that fills my feeds, I had to come up with something else to try and keep up motivation while re-developing habits. And what does work, always has worked for me, is a challenge, a medal and some sort of game. Ideally all three. The challenges we had set haven’t kept me going. I haven’t been able to work towards them and they haven’t provided the kick up the arse required. So just entering another race or setting a park run target or whatever isn’t going to work – its not immediate enough. So I decided I would try a virtual challenge, something that tracks as you go along rather than something that is just an end goal; something that provides interest over time and an incentive to reach the next thing and something that allows me to go at my pace. And of course I need a medal at the end. A quick google and I landed on the Conqueror Virtual Challenges. I signed up for a challenge (I’ll tell you more about which one and why that one etc next time) to see if it might just work and keep me motivated through the really hard bit of starting again.

Well, it did its first job which was to get me out today when I really just wanted to curl up and stare into space and work out how I managed to work all day without having anything to show for it. I went out only because I wanted to see if the app worked, if my strava would sync to it and what the look and feel of the app and challenge would be. So yeah – gamification works. For me anyway. I did 2 miles again. Run/Walk at 30/30 intervals. This time for the full two miles. I went the same mile out as previously but ran past a guy I know who was out chatting and we had a friendly exchange but I really didn’t want a second interaction on the way back so I turned off and went down hill. So I did run a slightly easier route in terms of slopes but I kept the run/walk going until the 2 mile beep on my watch. Then I walked the .70 of a mile home up the hill. Happy with that. Oh and me not wanting another interaction had nothing to do with the guy, I was a proper no people zone after work today.

Einstein receiving instructions from the Dino gang
Odin – not too sure about being watched while having his tea

Anyway, I will tell you more about the challenge and the app as I get into it but for now there is one thing I want to mention because it pissed me off as I was completing the registration on the app. It’s a distance challenge, right. You can count all sorts of exercise to contribute, all good. I like that because it makes it really inclusive. But then the app asked for me height and weight. Annoying in itself. It doesn’t need that to track distance travelled. It’s irrelevant to the thing the app is designed for. And then, as if asking for weight wasn’t bad enough, it asked for ideal weight. So there it is. Just like that we have again made the assumption that exercise and signing up to a challenge must be about weight loss. Had they asked these questions before I signed up for the challenge I wouldn’t have signed up. It annoys the hell out of me. There is no reason for the app to need the information. The challenges are based on distance traveled, that doesn’t change based on how much someone weighs. I am not doing a challenge to lose weight. I am not running to lose weight, I am not going to the gym to lose weight. I am not doing anything to lose weight. I am doing the things I am doing to be fitter and stronger and so I can keep having adventures. My weight bobbing about a bit is a side effect of that, not a driving force. Anyway, I had already bought the challenge, so I completed the app registration, gave them my current weight as both the current and ideal weight which might fry their algorithm a bit at least and got over myself.

Next time I will tell you where in the virtual world I am and why I chose it and any other musings. For now, I have some more marking to do – you know, academic and that time of year!

Time for Big Girl Pants!

Jess Guth1 Comment

And just like that we are in mid April. I mean what the actual fuck are we doing in April? Remember my happy run back in January? The one where I felt good. Yep, can we go back to that please. It really felt like I was getting somewhere again and that fitness was slowly coming back and that running could be really fun again. And then I got flu. I was off work for most of January because I just couldn’t shake it. I feel like I was not only off work, I feel like I may have stepped off the world – I don’t really remember January. I was asleep or reading or watching romance fiction – because that’s normal for me (not). I am not having a go at romance readers here – you do you. It’s just not my thing generally and I am still at a loss to explain why it was then. Anyway, February just felt like a battle to get through a day without falling asleep. I did very little in terms of moving off the sofa/ chair. I went to work when I had to but otherwise I was just a couch potato because anything else was too exhausting. I went for a walk at Bolton Abbey and then needed a 2 week rest.

Towards the end of February I thought that maybe it was time to get moving again. I was scared of running though. I didn’t want to get down the road and not be able to function. So I got on the bike in the garage and actually it wasn’t horrendous. I did two days back to back of cycling for 45 minutes ish taking it easy, not following a programme, just sort of peddling along thinking about nothing much. Then I did another virtual ride a week later. And there we are in March and I can still barely move – clearly running the Kielder 11 mile night run was never going to happen. We still went to Kielder Water even though neither of us could do our races and we had a couple of lovely walks instead of our planned runs – but I was tired. I slept lots, lounged in the hot tub, did some very gentle yoga.

When we got back from Kielder Water, we decided to try the gym again. We’re too old to get away with not strength training so we have been going – not lots but at least once and mostly twice a week for a good weights session. We went really early on a Sunday and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. Maybe I just hadn’t woken up yet. So the gym has been the most consistent. Yoga is second. On the 23rd March I finally went for a run. Just a mile at run walk of 30/30. It should be easy, right. Well it wasn’t. But I did it and tried hard not to be grumpy about it. But then I was scared again so ended up not doing anything, then going back to HITT once or twice and then today I went for another run. Same thing: A mile run walk and then turn round. This time I kept going a bit after I turned round so in total I ran/walked a mile and a half and walked half a mile. Progress is progress.

I’ve deferred Rasselbock’s Sherwood Big Loop event that we were looking at doing next weekend to their 2 day winter event instead and we have a plan for that – watch this space. The next thing booked is the 23k at the Lakeland Trails in July – I am not thinking about it really. I am not likely to be ready and that’s ok. I can’t rush this. I just need to build some consistency, just get out there one step at a time. Motivation is hard because running is actually just hard at the moment. It isn’t fun and I am struggling to access the memory bank of fun running.

So anyway, that’s where I’ve been in case you’ve missed me. I’ve been hiding and grumpy and frustrated and paralysed by the task ahead. But being grumpy about fitness lost and scared of how hard it’s going to be will not actually make me feel any better and will also absolutely not get me fit again. So it’s time for big girl pants. I am a 47 year old woman, I am generally fuelled by perimenopausal rage (and caffeine) – I can do anything.

Happy 10 Year Dopey anniversary

Jess GuthLeave a comment

10 Years ago today I ran my first marathon. And my first marathon was part of my first Dopey Challenge. 10 Years. The world has changed. I have changed. And yet it also seems like yesterday. I had a much longer blogpost in draft. I was trying to make sense of the last 10 years plus of running and what I have learned. But I couldn’t quite get the words right. I am not sure I am quite clear on what it is I wanted to say. Or maybe it’s my flu-fogged brain. I started drafting the post just after I posted the last one about feeling good – then I got flu so I haven’t run all week. So maybe what I started drafting doesn’t feel quite right now.

So I will just share these two pictures. Our Dopey Challenge Finisher picture and the Marathon medal. Reflections of what is now really 11 years of running properly – sometimes more not running than running – might still come. But as I sit on the sofa today feeling frustrated that I got flu just as I was settling into quite a nice exercise routine, let’s just let this be a reminder that sometimes it is fun to do the impossible.

Good luck to all the Dopeys starting the marathon tomorrow. One foot in front of the other!

Feeling Good.

Jess Guth1 Comment

The bed was warm and cosy this morning. I wasn’t really quite ready to wake up fully and start the day and taking coffee back to bed and curling up with my book was very tempting. But I can curl up and read at any time, the chances of me getting out and running diminish with every extra minute spent in bed. And I did sort of want to run. I wanted to finish the week on a high and have done my three runs this week. I am also not at all sure about what the weather is going to do over the next week and if it gets snowy/icy, I won’t run. I get too scared. So I wanted to make sure I go out and run while I can.

Kath, I think, felt much the same so we did what we had agreed the night before and set off to Bolton Abbey without allowing ourselves to talk ourselves and each other out of going. It was cold. It was -3 according to the car and with the windchill felt colder than that. I was nicely wrapped up with my long sleeved running top tucked in and my running jacket over the top, ruff around my neck and a hat. That’s quite rare for me. Given that I spent 2025 feeling like I was mostly overheating, it felt glorious to be out in the cold. Kath had suggested she might do our Bolton Abbey aqueduct loop backwards. Doing familiar routes backwards is fun. You see things differently, so I did the same.

This was my ‘long’ run. The aim was really just to get round the loop. I didn’t have that much confidence that it would be pain free but I has hoping that it would be a niggle rather than proper pain. Anyway, once I had made my way tentatively over the bridge at the Cavendish Pavilion (it wasn’t actually that slippery – just looked it in the frost), I set off running 30 seconds and walking a minute. I just wanted to be really gentle with body and mind. I wanted to not get over excited at having had a good week with exercise. I wanted to try and get as far as I could without being in any pain.

It was quiet. I saw one or two people but really not many. I really enjoyed the stillness, the sunshine, the clear air. It took a few minutes to adjust to the cold air hitting my lungs but then everything seemed to come into sharp focus. I was aware of the surface being just a little harder than normal, the grass crunchy. I felt the cold air on my face and really noticed how bits of the route were even colder than others, I felt the effort of the sun to bring some warmth and the air drop a few degrees as I dropped further into the valley out of the sun’s reach. I heard the rustling of little birds and a dog bark in the distance. I heard my own breathing. It was all quite glorious really.

I got to 2.8 miles before I was really aware of any tightness. I had been aware of my body slowly warming up. At some point I had rolled my sleeves up a bit and wondered whether I was exposing enough to skin to get any benefit from the sun. Could my wrists make vitamin D was a question I pondered for a while (you know what I mean). At the aqueduct where I paused to take a picture, I briefly considered taking my hat off but didn’t, same with the ruff around my neck. I was warm but not that warm. So at just before 2 miles I began to be aware that my right ankle was stiff and my hip was getting a bit tight. But that was it. And it didn’t get any worse. I just kept going and managed a decent little run downhill to finish. Kath was waiting for me and there was a heron in the middle of the river looking rather majestic. There was no pain. It was perfect. 3.5 miles. Slow and steady with lots of walking. This feels sustainable. This feels like sensible building blocks. This feels good!