Love Hearts Can Be Surprisingly Accurate

When you're running Awfully Long Distances, you can't just run and run and run. You need fuel. Over the last few months I've experimented with a few different things, based on ideas from the RW fora and magazines. When I started out doing what are now shorter distances - 6 miles or so - I'd rely on just a carb drink (Lucozade Sport) to get me through. When I started to extend the distances, I tried Jelly Babies. This resulted in me returning home one afternoon to quote the immortal line, "There's a Cry-Baby Boobles at the top of the by-pass". There was. Really. I dropped it on my way down and only noticed when I stumbled past it again on my way back. Some small rodent must have thought it was Christmas come early.

Jelly Babies require some chewing though, and need a fair slug of liquid to rinse your mouth out. I tried Love Hearts initially a few weeks ago, then last week I thought I'd give a go with these fancy energy gels. I bought one - a Lucozade Sport, orange flavour - a few weeks back, and decided it was time to try it.

What I discovered was that they'd omitted to add two words to the flavour description, and in fact it should have read "Orange Wallpaper Paste Flavour". I had to expend more energy getting it out of the tube-packet than I actually gleaned from consuming it (I have to say "consumed" because the texture of the gel precludes using the words "eating" or "drinking"). The initial flavour was OK, but once it had started to go down - EURRRGH. Quick, pass the drink. It was, as we say in the Black Country, extremely "clarty" in the mouth, and really did seem as though I'd accidentally swallowed a small quantity of Solvite.

So, this week, I've ordered some gels from SIS (Science in Sport), which were top-rated by RW, being far more palatable and less pastey than other gels. In the meantime, though, it was back to the Love Hearts.

So, 14 miles yesterday. I started getting depressed by the prospect when trying to plot a route on G-Maps Pedometer and realised that I could run to Stourbridge Ring-Road and back and still not have covered the distance. And the prospect of running through Lye really wasn't appealing. Twenty-odd curry houses is great when you've had a few beers on a Friday night, but when you're stone-cold sober on a Thursday afternoon and you've still got to run back to Halesowen, it's a bit tough. So I decided to run up to Romsley instead.

It was certainly picturesque. The error I made, though, was forgetting exactly how much uphill is involved in getting from Halesowen to Romsley. About 2-3 miles, is how much. Mind you, it was very picturesque when I got up there - it was a perfect afternoon for it, the sun was out, and the Clent Hills always look great - even in the rain. And, following the inescapable laws of gravity, I got to run down it again the other side.

After that, it was the inescapable loop down the by-pass and back. By the time I was getting towards the top of the Hagley Mile - about 11 miles by this point - everything below my waist had started to dissolve into a kind of numb pain. By which I mean I was fully aware of the fact that things were painful, but I had started to lose appreciation of exactly how much. To give you an idea, after my run last week, I was getting in the bath when I clonked my left kneecap against the side of the bath. Usually this would be enough to at least make me turn the air blue and hop around a bit (this all relates to going ar*e over t*t in Portugal whilst running a couple of years ago, and landing directly on my left knee cap). I barely noticed it, but the bruising was very evident over the next few days.

Anyway, so I'm trudging on, some kind of bloody-mindedness causing me to put one foot in front of the other. It is almost overpoweringly tempting to stop at the Badger's Sett for a pint of lemonade, barring the fact that I have no money. But I carry on, and decide it's time for another Love Heart (I have been steadily letting them dissolve in my mouth over the past six miles, like a kind of glucose drip-feed). For some reason, I decide to read this one. I think I was getting a little desperate for distraction.

"CRAZY"

Nuff said.