by James Birk
Chapter 8
I was awoken by the shrill sound of the alarm function on my cheap ‘pay as you go’ mobile phone. It was a sound I had become all too familiar with over the past few days. With a groan I extended my arm from underneath the duvet and switched off the offending handset. I pulled it back into the bed and glanced at the screen. Six thirty in the morning. It was not a time of day I had known for some years now, not since my stint of working as a stockroom assistant for a major high street retailer when I had been obliged to get up for the seven o’clock delivery and even then I was nearly always late, much to the consternation of the delivery driver. Back then I had my colleagues to cover for me, but there was no-one else who could reasonably be asked to go for a run around Roath Park on my behalf, so I resolved to get up. In five minutes time.
Twenty minutes later I awoke with a start.
‘I’ve got to do it today,’ I said out loud to myself. After five false starts, I knew it was imperative that I actually got up and went for my first training session. I forced myself out of bed and looked wearily at my ‘training gear’ that was hanging over the slightly ajar wardrobe door. It had been so long since I had last done any exercise that I didn’t really possess any sporting paraphernalia, so the best I could manage was an old Cardiff City shirt, from the days when I used to go to the odd game with Dave before he moved away, a pair of old baggy swimming shorts, last worn when I attempted to go surfing with Rob about two years previously (I couldn’t even do the transition from lying flat to standing up when the board was on dry land, so my hopes of progressing to the sea were short-lived, although I had enjoyed body boarding, which is surfing for the less co-ordinated.)
The only trainers I owned were a pair of badly scuffed tennis shoes that had been purchased entirely for fashion purposes a long time ago, when dressing fashionably was actually of some concern to me. Whether or not they were suitable for long distance running I wasn’t sure, but until I had actually proved to myself that I was going to go through with this endeavour, purchasing an expensive pair of running trainers did not seem to be an appropriate use of my underwhelming wages.