The Joy of Running Wrongly

I like running. It’s a time for you to zone out, drift through the world, feel the blood pumping in your veins to the thurump thurump thurump of your heartbeat.

But I think, technically, I might be doing it incorrectly, and I’m trying to work out how. Just in case I come across a wild boar and have to engage the latter part of the ol’ ’fight-or-flight’ mechanism.

There are a number of occasions where this comes to the fore. For example, when I’m out for a run, this is often what I see:

Determination. Focus. Controlled, even breathing. The occasional drop of strictly regulated sweat.

I don’t tend to stalk people, but if I were to pursue one of these ‘proper’ runners all around their route, I imagine they would maintain this disciplined appearance the whole terrifyingly long way.

However, the variation of running I tend to practice goes as follows:

Stage One: The Warm-Up Phase

Here we go! You set up your iPod (If you’re in an iPod mood), do a couple of stretches, and get going. Even footfalls. A quickening heartbeat. A calm façade as you contain the excitement of the adventure ahead.

Stage Two: The “Oh what a glorious day!” Phase 

The joy of running consumes you! You run to the beat of the music, pretend you are a professional runner, or a hero in a movie, or that all your family and friends are squeezed onto the pavement screaming “Go on! You’re so close!” and holding back tears of joy. You’re not running – you’re gliding, sweeping, soaring on the thermals of tarmac ‘neath your wingèd feet!

Stage Three: The “Just run to that lamppost… Now that one… Now that one…” Phase 

 The “Oh what a glorious day” Phase is a distant memory as the warmth in your limps is replaced by lactic acid and pure gravitational pull. Your earphones keep slipping out and attacking your shoes, you have stepped in faeces, and depending on the time of year kamikaze flies have their sights set firmly on your iris. You dodge yet another runner-hating car and motivate yourself by trying to work out what percentage of the route you’ve done. You work out what percentage of the route you’ve done and feel sad.

So there you have it. Most of my runs play out a little something like that. To be fair, there is a fourth stage, and that is the feeling of pride and happiness you feel as you tramp down the home stretch. But it is in this fourth stage that we find the root of my next concern…

I seem to think that completing a run warrants a nice big reward. A reward which is normally oozing calories.

It’s not until the dust has cleared and I realise I’ve completely nullified all the health benefits of the run that my pride is replaced by guilt.

And this guilt continues on the days I just can’t muster the energy or willpower for a run. I’ll be walking home from uni or work munching on a pastry and somebody will gallop past, judging me with their well-toned calve muscles.

But in the end, the guilt doesn’t last, or at least swings fleetingly back to pride later. Pursuit of inner peace should always outweigh the desire for toned calves.

And even if I am running wrongly somehow, I don’t intend to change my ways any time soon (Although I should probably start investing in fruit rather than pastries). We all have our ways of venting out steam or retreating into that special zone in our minds. Everything just becomes that little bit clearer when we find it. All our thoughts take on a sharper focus.

Mine just happens to be running wrongly. 

How Face-Fur Failure Gave Me An Epiphany

My body has failed me over the last week, and I have failed my body.

The first example that comes to mind is its pitiful attempt at a beard.

Meandering around campus day in day out, I couldn’t help but notice that beards are apparently all the rage. From subtle five-o’clock-shadow to outright “A GREAT BIG BUSHY BEARD”s, simple male logic was screaming at me that to get all the ladies, I just needed to let nature do its thing on my chin. So I listened to my simple male logic, and unsurprisingly it let me down.

Admittedly, the reason I first embarked on my journey to beardhood was simply because I was too lazy to shave. But I decided, as I looked into the mirror one morning, razor held aloft, that I’d spare my face and give it a go. What’s the worst that could happen?

It started off pretty well. Early on, a mature shade of growth appeared obediently across my face. I glowed with pride.

As time went on, I embraced my new face-fur. I walked past people thinking I bet they think I’m a loveable rogue or Restrain yourselves, ladies. (Actually, I’ve never thought that in my life, but the point is I felt pretty happy with it.)

Then, all hell broke loose…

Spurts of wiry strands everywhere. Uneven contagions of murky growth. And had some patches of hair actually retreated back into my face!? It was chaos. My face looking like a hedge that had been trimmed by a furious ape with a blender.

I attempted some damage control. Grabbed a razor and shaving foam, lathered my face, hacked away until some semblance of my former pride returned.

Shaken but undeterred, I headed to a party that night with colleagues from my part-time job. It was a great night, and our tongues loosened by satisfaction and all the… juice we’d been drinking, one of my female friends touched my beard and said: “Aww, your wee beard.”

This is it! I thought. I’ve done it! I’m a successful bearer of the beard – a king of the five o’clock shadow! I’ve… Wait.

There was something in her tone. I could tell it. She hadn’t said “Aww, your wee beard” in an admiring or impressed way. More in the way you’d say it to a three-year-old who’d smeared their face with marker pen.

“Do you… like it?” I asked tentatively.

I received an vaguely pitying and terrifying smile in response.

The next morning, I shaved.

A second example of my body’s laughable attempts at success and efficiency involves sleep deprivation.

Following the aforementioned party, I stayed up far later than I normally would. By the time I slumped into bed that night, it was barely even that night any more.

Nonetheless, I got a decent-ish sleep and woke up feeling relatively capable of normal life. It was a struggle, but I managed to study a bit:

I toiled through some ironing:

I even went for a run, and as far as I know only plunged face-first into the ground once or twice:

Either way, I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep when darkness fell. With the day done, I got myself washed, changed, and got into bed. I felt the softness of the pillow, the comforting embrace of the sheets.

I closed my eyes.

I opened them.

I closed them again.

I kept them closed.

I opened them.

I stared at the ceiling.

I stared at the ceiling for three hours.

I like to imagine my brain and body were having an argument throughout all of this.

Body: Phew! What a day. Time for some rest, eh, brain, you old ragamuffin you.

Brain: No.

Body: Erm… no?

Brain: No. Stuff do.

Body: What stuff? Brain, we need sleep.

Brain: No sleep. Stuff. We do stuff.

Body: We’ve been doing stuff all day! AND all of last night! We need rest!

Brain: NO REST! Brain like work til sun-up. Brain like!

Body: Braaaaain. I’m warning you…

Brain: IT 3:30am! BRAIN HAPPY AND EXCITED! BRAIN LIKE SUN-UP! BRAIN YELL FOR LOTS MORE HOURS!

Body: God DAMN you, brain! I’ll come up there! I’LL DO IT!

And on and on and on.

Either way, Brain won over for most of the night before Body managed to smother the wrinkly wee gremlin. Late on, I decided I may as well make the most of my time and wrote for a while in bed, which was actually pretty pleasant apart from the skull-splitting pain and the pull of gravity on my eyelids increasing exponentially.

I suppose the purpose of this passage is to illustrate our irrationality and rationality, whether deliberate or not. Our ability to ignore logic and do stupid things (e.g. grow ill-fated beards), which we then sort out in fits of productivity or pragmatism (e.g. Shave the bloody thing off after learning from the experience. Or making do when you can’t sleep and doing something that sets you at ease.) is very human. And I'm pretty proud of that shared trait to be honest.

We say short-sighted things. We lose our temper. We get defensive when we know we're in the wrong.

We waste our time. Or we spend too much time on something we shouldn't. We get involved when we don't need to. We fight when we should run, or vice versa.

We trust people we shouldn't. We let ourselves get hurt.

And through much (but not all) of this we can find a little voice in the back of our head saying "Whoooow there! Tread carefully, good sir, this is my body too." But we go on anyway.

Yet maybe this doesn't matter. Come to think of it, a world where we don't do anything wrong or questionable would, within reason, be pretty flippin' boring. And stagnant. If a few pioneering scientists or explorers in the past hadn't blown themselves up or eaten something that should really stay in the ground, we wouldn't be where we are today. We learn from deliberate, tactical stupidity. And we grow stronger from picking up the pieces afterwards.

(Apart from those scientists I mentioned earlier. In that particular case, they usually ended up being the pieces needing picked up. But we still learned from it!)

Basically, we can be pretty stupid. May as well embrace that: it gives us funny stories and things to think about. But when we get our act together, we can get our act together pretty darn well.

I Got Me A Whiteboard!

This is a self-portrait I made with Paint software:

While the long sharp nose and unusually shaped skull are startlingly accurate (The nose is a family thing. The skull is not... My dad probably dropped me on my head or something, caused some evolutionary head-mis-shapenning, skull-thickening survival response), I would like to confirm here and now a few things:
1.) I have more than 15 strands of hair.
2.) I do not suffer from jaundice.
3.) I have no shirt decorated with a hazy grey miasma of death.
4.) I enjoy making lists.
The moral of the story is that I am not very good at using Paint.

Here is a self-portrait I did in my spare time last year:

I had a weird fashion sense back then.

Nah, I'm kidding you. That's Louis XIV in Ballet de la nuit (c. 1650). Anyway, enough culture, back to rambling.

The point is that I'm keen on making this blog an interesting one, and while writing's grand, writing and pictures is just plain braw! So I had a good old ponder as to how I could spice up the blog without relying on my questionable Paint skills (Although no doubt it'll rear its ugly head from time to time), and I thought: How about drawing pictures by hand, then taking a photo and uploading them? Then I remembered I'm a student and that paper is a valued commodity now, alongside biscuits, clothes and cheese.

What to do, what to do...

I got me a frickin' whiteboard, people! Let the good times commence!

Sit Yourself Down Weary Traveller, I Have A Tale To Tell...

This blog has a weird name. Many do, as a matter of fact, but this one seems near-unintelligible upon first glance. There are actually reasons for this, and I'm going to strain my fingers in an effort to enlighten you.

My name is Gavin, and my middle initials are N and A. GNA. Gna. And yes, I do have two middle names. It's not a sign of snootiness. I don't look down on people with just one, or indeed no, middle names. I'm not selfishly hoarding names from the International Naming Fund out of selfishness. This is flawed for a number of reasons:

1.) The International Naming Fund doesn't exist.

2.) Names aren't really a finite resource. Unless names were not allowed to be re-used... In which case we'd all have weird unique designations like GEFFO1995 and there'd be wars over who could be called normal names like Allan or Katie. What an interesting thought...

3.) My parents named me, so if you have to throw rocks at anybody, throw rocks at them.

4.) Also, they're the names of both my grandads, so I think it's justified.

But I digress.

The 'blag' part comes from my friend Andy, following this Facebook conversation regarding the ceiling of my flat, which had been recently leaking murky water quite horrifically:

Andy: "Oh, how is your flat? Is it alive?"

Me: "It's currently having surgery, but it's holding steady. The floor had dried up and the pipe wasn't leaking when I got back (from Christmas holiday) anyway."

Andy: "But there is a hole in your roof."

Me: "Currently, yes, but there are builders patching it up right now, trapping me in my room. Which is bad because I just came back from the gym and need a shower. Quite badly. As in, my overflowing bin is staring at me judgementally for stinking it out. So now I'm eating biscuits to pass the time."

Andy: " :L You should definitely have a blag of simple things like that."

Me: "A blag you say? A blag appeals. A blag. Hehe."

And so a simple typo brought about Gna's Blag, for better or worse.

I should include at this point a message directly to Andy: Yes, I did polish up our spelling, grammar, and punctuation from that conversation. It was bad. And this isn't Facebook any more, this blog has standards!

(Also, "simple things"!? Since when did I ever do things simply Andy, you know I always accidentally make life hard for myself! Sooo... if I deliberately make this hard for me, I'll accidentally make it easy... right? Right? Anyone?)

Onwards and upwards (Well, downwards really) to the purpose of Gna's Blag. Maybe at some point I'll draw up a Gna's Blag Declaration of Intent or something, but for now a brief run-down of what the heck is/has/will going/gone/go down on these humble pages will do quite nicely!

Gna's Blag is going to be a place for musings, ramblings, and hopefully generally entertaining anecdotes. It will be by-and-large light-hearted, but sometimes if there's something bigger on my mind, I'll try to express it in an engaging way which will hopefully act as food for thought.

I'm into history, politics, journalism and writing, but won't burden the blog with too much heavy histopolnalismiting, because I appreciate it's not all that thrilling all the time for everyone, and my inclusion of things like that in my facebook and twitter feeds left it with a bewildering multiple-personality disorder. This led to little or no boundary between the pat-your-shanties hilarity and the oh-god-those-poor-poor-people seriousness. I may include links to other sources or my own journalism at some point, but for the sake of Gna's Blag: it's gonnae be pure mental lyke!

(Confession #1: Despite my incredible Glaswegian typing skills there, I'm not actually a Weegie. I was actually born in the Vale of Leven, about ten or twenty miles out. I'm a fraud! I admit it now!)

Right, now that that's out of the way: the odyssey begins! I hope you enjoy the journey.

(This is me gazing wistfully at all the possibilities laid ahead. And also spying on the interesting characters emerging from the crisis centre I live above.)

UPDATE: Andy has since informed me that he apparently didn't use blag accidently. I think he's wrong. Nonetheless, here's a comic from xkcd proving how funny the word is. Enjoy!