Intervals

By Kate Webb

9 October

Week four and I had to skip a session. I missed running, tea and cake on Tuesday as I had tickets for a play. I made up for it with butterscotch ice cream in the interval.

Intervals can mean different things in different circumstances. For me, until Get Started, the interval only happened at the theatre. It meant queuing for the loo or trying (usually in vain) for mobile reception to get an update on a ‘very important’ football match or something similar.

Over the last few weeks, intervals have been different. There’s been less ice cream for a start. The gentle and considered Green Team intro to running Striders-style has majored on intervals: run, (power) walk, run, (power) walk, repeat, until you’re back at the track for a warm down.

And then, in Thursday’s session, there was no interval.

Now, at the theatre in my experience ‘no interval’ isn’t always a good sign, for at least two reasons. First, there’s no chance to spend too much money on a small tub of ice cream. Second, there has been the odd occasion when I suspected that it was simply a way of stopping me walking out of a bad play.

‘No interval’ at Striders means something else entirely: we keep on running. On paper, given our sessions so far, this was a big step. The intervals were always a chance to catch up and get your breath back.

I suppose I knew this day would come, but the week 1 butterflies made a short reappearance as I wondered through the warm-up whether I’d manage to make it through to the end without stopping.

But to my amazement, ‘no interval’ didn’t leave me in an exhausted heap, and I coped. Okay, so we observed the Green Cross Code all the way round, and from time to time we jogged at a traffic light, but by the time we got back to the track we’d clocked up nearly 32 mins! It’s been years since I managed that and I was very chuffed as I made my way home.

Would it have been right to celebrate with an ice cream? Probably not. I’ll save that for another time, maybe after the 5k in a couple of weeks time.