Another day, another jog. Fitness improving with surprising rapidity. There’s a point you pass, a metabolism thing, where you’ve warmed up sufficiently to, in the words of the Spencer Davis Group, ‘keep on running’.
The goal is to get as fit as was a couple of years ago. My best-ever jogs were along the Thames path (North side) west to Charing Cross; along the Thames path (South side) to Waterloo; the same, in the other direction; and along the Thames path (both sides) east to the Thames Barrier (and back). Which might not sound that far, as the crow flies, but I am not a crow, I’m a lardy shortarse, and the Thames path is very meandering and often not clearly indicated, so you have to factor in a couple of miles of getting lost and retracing routes. I’m not sure how long my best-ever jogs were; something over ten miles.
But it means I know bits of London other people don’t know. I know that the Greenwich Millennium Village (as seen on BBC idents) is directly downwind of a rubbish tip. It means I recognise pretty much all the locations from Spooks. And I even found, near West Silvertown, a bridge which goes over the DLR line and then goes nowhere. It looks like it might be leading somewhere but turns out to be closed off.
The other vivid memory of jogging is the music I associate with certain places. I associate Kate Nash’s super-motivating Pumpkin Soup with battling through the elements on Blackheath; somehow it just all came together in a moment. I associate ABBA - the Album with Wapping High Street, and I associate The Beatles’ Revolution 9 with sprinting through the dodgy bit of Lee (which is all of it) during the hours of darkness.
