First things first. Today’s session at the gym means that I’ve exercised in one way or another for 11 days running (or not), making it my longest streak of proper exercise, ever. As has been well documented here already, I’ve had foot problems and so I’ve been taking it easy on the old plates of meat. However, it hasn’t stopped me doing other things and now I’m in unchartered waters. Anything could happen. Maybe I’ll implode on day 12, I just don’t know.

So today I had my rearranged appointment at the gym. Planned as a one and a half hour extravaganza of exercise and planning – it didn’t fail to deliver.

I joined Edge Hill Uni fitness suite the other month because I wanted to get some proper training in to complement my ad-hoc running. As part of the membership you can have a session with a personal trainer each week. Sam is the unfortunate soul who drew the short straw and got me.

We started with a 30 minute chat about goals, exercising and running. This guy appeared to be fitter than almost everyone else that I know with the exception of Danny, my cousin, and Matthias; so I felt a bit silly explaining about how I signed up for a half marathon in October and how I think I need a bit of proper training. He seemed to take this in his stride and we started to map out a training programme that involved a lot of aerobic / cardio-vascular endurance and weights. And running. Lots of running. Although to be fair, less than I’d expected.

The principle appears to be: first get me knackered on the treadmill and rowing machines… and then get me doing some endurance exercises on a summit machine and a cross-training thing. It seems to do the trick. It took a long time, though; and so we’ve got another session booked for next week to go through the weights.

Sam seems like a decent bloke. He organises the Monday running club and seems switched on with the training programmes. We agreed that we would have a session each week where I can go through my runs and exercises and we can make sure that I’m sticking to the plan and making progress. I rather like the idea of rocking up in a couple of weeks proudly showing off the results of my planned cock run. Hopefully he won’t take it the wrong way.

In the changing room after the session there was a bloke there, probably late fifties, early sixties who engaged me in conversation. Normally I would keep well and truly to myself, but it turned out that Sam had told him about my training.

“Hey kid, I was once like you.”, he (sort of) said, “Middle-aged and unfit with dreams of running”.

He went on to tell me how he took up running and training at Edge Hill a few years ago. How he’d worked with Sam and how he recently completed 11 marathons around Europe. It was all rather inspirational.

It feels like a new chapter in the training and in preparing for the run in Birmingham. All very positive.