Run! Run! Run!
That's JonnyB going for a jog around the picturesque Norfolk village that he calls home.
Jonny's Private Secret Diary is one of my favourite online reads. In March this year it appeared in the Observer's list of the world's 50 most powerful blogs1. I like Jonny's sense of humour and feel a strange kinship with him. For one thing, we both talk to things that don't usually talk back. We both also have partners who don't think our jokes are very funny.
Jonny's a very good writer, so if you go and check out his blog and don't come back, I'll understand.
Anyway, I'm learning to jog and my rhythm currently goes, Run! Wheeze! Run! Whee-OK, that's 30 seconds, time for my one-minute walking break before I have to run again. Hmm, I'm pretty puffed, better make that a two-minute walking break. Oh! A group of young people are coming this way! I have to start running again or they'll laugh at me (the young can be so cruel)! (Thirty seconds later ...) The burning! The BURNING!
Speed and stamina are the things I'm aiming for in my training regime.
My friends think I am learning to jog for all the usual reasons, and these reasons are certainly good ones. Time and bacon have taken their toll and bits are sagging and poking out where they shouldn't be. I would like to live past 50 and not require any robotic assistance. And once past 50 I would prefer not to have to use a rag on a stick to reach bits of myself in the bath.
But I'll tell you a secret.
The real reason I am learning to jog, is zombies.
That's right. Zombies.
You say it will never happen, but I'll bet that's what the people in Resident Evil, I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead, and 28 Days thought as well. Yes, yes, I know they are movies, but those actors all looked pretty darn surprised to me.
Every day we are exposed to new additives and chemicals, genetically engineered foods, nuclear wastes and their by-products (well, maybe not those ones every day), and when it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I refuse to be the chubby one at the back that the zombies grab hold of first.
(Mind you, if I did get bitten and became a zombie, I would derive a lot of satisfaction from hunting down my arch-nemeses and taking a bite out of them: that lady who shouted at me in a car park once, the man who cut a copy of my house keys and did a shoddy job, that hairdresser's apprentice who burnt my scalp with the hairdryer and gave me dandruff for six months ... oh, the list is endless.)
But, let's focus on the positive for now. My plan is to be the feisty, fit, gutsy Amazon that holes up on the roof with a radio, a t-shirt that showcases my abs (you'll be able to see them by then), and a sawn-off shotgun that takes out the living dead with satisfying chik-chik-BOOM noises. Preferably in the company of another gutsy, fit, male survivor who looks like Lee Pace, has watched a lot of MacGyver, and isn't hiding a zombie bite that's going to flare up later.
I'm feeling pretty confident. My training is going well. If we encountered a mob of zombies tomorrow, I'd be the second chubby person that they would grab hold of.
1 The world's 50 most powerful blogs, Jessica Aldred, Amanda Astell, Rafael Behr, Lauren Cochrane, John Hind, Anna Pickard, Laura Potter, Alice Wignall and Eva Wiseman, The Observer, March 9, 2008. Retrieved from the Guardian website (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs).