Last Thursday was, quite frankly one of my worst running club experiences.  At 6.45pm I was looking forward to a slow plod round Lingfield with my running club pals as I hadn’t seen them since my holiday.  I ambled up to the club for a 7pm start in anticipation of a chummy coffee morning natter whilst running.  How wrong I was.  Ultra Marathon runner Eddie was there.  Eddie is 30 something, slim, blond, pretty and a serious ’50 mile before breakfast’ runner.  She cheerily suggested that we should all run to the park in Dormansland and do some ‘uphill training’.  ‘Run to the park’,  I was astounded.  It is at least 2 miles.  I tried to hail a taxi and failed so ended up running to the park as fast as I could, and only about 1/2 a mile behind the other ladies.  When I arrived about 30 minutes later in a state of near cardiac arrest the others were already adopting strange squatting positions.  Oh please, this was not what I envisaged for a sunny Thursday evening.  Little Trevor was looking on enthusiastically as all his protégées leapt up and down in Lycra.  I spotted a garden gate in the hedge and momentarily considered sneaking through it and sitting in someone’s back garden until this hideousness was over.  ‘Come on girls let’s do burpees’ Eddie shouted.  It became apparent that a ‘burpee’ was a kind of  squat with turned into a leaping frog action with great speed.  ‘Come on girls let’s now run up to the SECOND oak tree as fast as we can then back down’.  SECOND OAK TREE!  I needed my glasses to see it.  I plodded up the path begrudgingly and was over taken at least 3 times by Eddie on her 3rd lap.  ‘Thank God for that’ I muttered when I had eventually staggered back down.  Then I heard  ‘We will just repeat this all twice now…’  I could not believe that someone so pretty and smiley could actually be a sadistic army PT instructor in disguise. How misleading appearances can be.  I grimaced and groaned through another half an hour of torture then Eddie said we could all sprint back to Lingfield. No way.  I got a lift back in Little Trevor’s blue Polo and decided there and then to avoid all Thursday nights at running club.
I am running the New York Marathon 2013 for Macmillan Cancer Support. If you are enjoying reading my blogs please donate at: http://www.justgiving.com/jayneandtrevorwebb