Observations of a cheese plant

I always love the way that a covering of snow on the ground outside reflects the day onto the ceilings inside the house and enhances the quality of the light. I would be a very happy guineapig for a dimmable ceiling full of LED lights, but in the meantime I enjoy our occasional snowy days all the more for the change in light.

I’m not averse to running in the snow, but only if it’s off-road. There is far too little traction on snowy pavements and the risk of injury outweighs any other considerations… including any adverse comments from my more… er, manly friends.

So instead I put on my shorts and climbed aboard the running machine. I’m sure that visitors think it’s an odd piece of furniture to have in the middle of an otherwise Zen-ish environment like ours, but I think more houses should have one… in fact, one of my neighbours clearly agrees and has recently bought one, albeit a bit flashier than our rather purposeful machine.

The downside of its location is that it faces a wall with only the leaves of a cheese plant to break the view. Two winters ago when I was training for the Brighton marathon and the world outside was deep with snow, I clocked up a number of long runs including one at 20 miles. It seems odd in retrospect that the subsequent marathon would break my mind in under two hours, when my mental muscle was strong enough to keep running whilst staring at the leaves of a cheese plant for three hours!

Today my aims were much more modest… a mere five miles. The machine shows progress around a quarter-mile track of LED lights and I decided to change the speed at each completed circuit. Starting at 6mph I increased through 6.5 and 7 to 7.5mph, before dropping back to 6.5 at the start of the next mile and repeating the process again.

This meant that at the end of mile four I was running at 9mph. In the final mile I reduced to 8.5, then to 8 and 7.5, but realising that I had the opportunity to run a sub 40-minute time, then increased the speed to 10mph to sprint to the end in 39.47, averaging just over 7.5mph overall.

Early on, Kim had noticed my get-on-and-run lack of preparation and had opened the door to the snowy garden, turned on the fan and had brought me a bottle of water… just as well since I had shed my shirt within a mile and by the end was dripping as if I was in a sauna.