The time has come. I can't deny it any more. It's 'new year, new me' season, and I've vowed to get my sorry ass running in 2015, by hook or by crook. The Run Way is my journey, and it starts right here.
It seems like a dim and distant memory, but back when I was still scoffing advent calendar chocolates for breakfast, I decided that if Santa thought I'd been a good girl in 2014, he'd reward me with running gear and a spiralizer for Christmas. Obviously what I really wanted was some satin pyjamas so I could spend more time lounging, but I was being virtuous on behalf of Future Emily, who would be working out like a machine come January 1st.
I'm going to own up right now that since the new year opened, I still haven't utilised a single one of my healthy Christmas gifts. Instead, just to compound how unhealthy I actually was, I've been struck down with the sorriest of chesty coughs (you know, the loud, incessant, hacking one which keeps you, your husband and your neighbours awake at night). Which also means I haven't run for anything more than my train in the first week of January (the grossest disappointment in my already long list of unloved resolutions). That train sprint not only set off an asthma attack (draw-back number one in my fitness quest), but also saw me stripping down to a vest in front of the packed train, which after the festive period's Potatogeddon, was quite the lumpy sight.
By way of introduction to my quest to discover fitness (not re-discover, you'll note, because I never had any in the first place), this is me in my natural habitat. Glass in hand. Head to toe lounge-wear. This is the LBD of my lounging looks (it was my birthday, so I was celebrating), usually it's more of a grey-on-grey prison marl that I favour to floop in. But don't I look happy? Ruining my happiness, however, is that unzipping this one-piece resembles when you pop open one of those nifty cardboard tins of ready-made Pillsbury dough. A squishy explosion.
Ain't nobody got time for looking like a Pillsbury Doughgirl when you work at Grazia. That wasn't the dream. Add to that the wheezing when I climb the stairs to our fourth floor office, the sweating as I raise my speed to jump on the train, and the nervous energy I instead expend in a series of panic attacks, and you've got yourself a bit of a sorry state.
But to be honest, all of those things I'd been happily ignoring for the last six months, because, I'm not actually overweight on a BMI chart, and I can always argue that I'm naturally a stress-head. Plus I just like eating too much. But when my joints began to do the dirty on me - we're talking constant lower back pain, a knee that just gave way as I was walking slowly in a pair of Birkenstocks, and feet which burn even when I'm wearing orthapaedic shoes - I realised that the time had come for me to spend a bit of time on my actual health.
I've always read health blogs and magazines like a kind of porn. I'd get out the iPad, line up a Wispa (a Mint Aero if I was feeling fancy), and absorb all those lovely fitness routines which I was definitely going to do. The superfoods I was absolutely going to consume tomorrow, once I'd polished off all the junk supplies. The nifty ways I would get four more hours of utilisable time out of my day instead of mainlining Game of Thrones (even though I'd seen them all already).
So this blog is my way to give myself accountability, so that I have to do a run, and tell you about it, even if it's rainy, or dark, or I just don't fancy it. To actually do what I've set out to do, and be able to run for a sustained period longer than two minutes. To speak to the experts I'd been reading from afar and get them to help me to help myself. To stop being an achy old lady at 32. To be able to run for my life if I needed to. And to possibly even be able to slide as smoothly into a pair of leather leggings as I would do into my jogging bottoms.
Are you with me? I promise to have started running (and stopped coughing) by the next installment.