I have trouble motivating myself to run. Paris isn’t helping.

Sure, it’s a beautiful city and all that, but it’s got two things that really don’t help. The first is that it’s not really runner-friendly. The parks are too small, the river towpath not very nice at night and the streets far too crowded to go running on. The second problem is that it’s in northern Europe, which means that by the time I leave the office, it’s not only cold, it’s dark.

I have no idea if running in the dark is worse than running during the daylight hours, because I haven’t run in the dark yet, I’m getting my motivational blockages out of the way early in my training regime. But I can tell you this – the thought of running in the dark is the opposite of motivating. Not demotivating, because I’m not demotivated, but more demotivational, in the sense that it sabotages my motivation and makes me have a glass of wine.

On a more positive note, the spoiled-brat Parisian transport workers are still sulking and striking (the two are intrinsically linked in the French psyche), which means I cycled to work again today. It’s colder and I should probably buy myself a pair of gloves if this is going to carry on, but I’m also getting to work in 13 minutes, instead of the more typical 40 minutes it takes on the metro. In France, certain industries are so inefficient that things actually get better when they stop functioning. Go figure.

Today, and probably on and off for some time to come, the Paris public transport infrastructure is on strike. Train drivers are trying to protect their “special regime” which allows them to retire on full benefits at age 50 because their job is so taxing. The upshot of this is that I am cycling to work on the Ve’Lib – the bicycles you can rent in Paris.

It’s a fantastic point-to-point bicycle network, where members can go to any one of hundreds of automated rental spots in Paris, identify themselves, and take a bicycle within seconds. You then cycle to wherever you need to go, and drop the bicycle off at another one of these automated rental stations. Provided your travel time was less than 30 minutes, it costs nothing (except your membership, which is €29 annually). Clearly there aren’t enough bicycles in this network for everyone, but not everyone wants to cycle to work in the early winter months, and I had no trouble finding a bicycle to get to work on.

The irony : I got to work twice as fast cycling as I normally do on the metro.

This doesn’t really classify as exercise. 20 minutes cycling through traffic isn’t going to contribute to my overall health in the context of reaching a level of fitness where I’m capable of running a half-marathon in a good time. But it’s definitely better than being stuck in a sweaty and overheated train carriage for 40 minutes.

In an attempt to spare my feet as they adapt to a regime of regular exercise, I regularly use the stationary bicycles in my local gym. I don’t do the group classes, as I don’t really enjoy being yelled at by a guy in spandex with a hyper-thyroid problem, so I get on one of the bikes when there is no class and the 30-odd bicycles are unused. They’re pared-down exercise bikes, not the gadgetry-enhanced models you get in the cardio room of the average gym.

I pedalled away for an hour last night, burning 837 calories with an average heart rate of 160, according to my very basic heart-rate monitor. I usually pedal very hard for one minute every tenth minute, and then pedal very gently with no resistance until my heart rate drops below 150, then I gradually increase the resistance again.

The bicycles are in this large room, at the other end of which is the gym reception, where some bemused sports instructors looked on as one person pedalled himself into a sweaty exhaustion on his own in the corner of the room. It’s Ok – I’m usually semi-conscious anyway as I listen to the kind of music that turns on the body while switching off the mind (Club mixes from Diagelev nightclub in Moscow, if you must know).

I’m not sure the exact benefit I’m going to get from exercising on a bicycle when I’m preparing for a half-marathon, but I can’t imagine it’ll do any harm. It certainly adds to the cardio I do, which benefits my general level of fitness. What I really need to do is find more time to go running outdoors, and the issue I have with that is getting used to running at night, as it’s dark by the time I get out of the office at the moment.

I am going to run the Paris half-marathon on the 2nd March 2008. I’ve never run that sort of distance before, certainly not outdoors, my lengthiest runs being circuits of Hyde Park, Green Park and St. James’ Park in London when I still lived there – that adds up to about 10 kilometres per run, and I seem to recall needing a short break in the middle. This little journal is expected to cover the intervening 110 days between today (12th November 2007) and the race day (2nd March 2008). Whether it becomes diary of achievement or a chronicle of pain remains to be seen.

I’m 33 years old, and I’m in fairly good shape, although definitely not the kind of shape where running a half-marathon is something I could do with ease.

I’m hoping to get a decent time, because I don’t see the point in undertaking a project like this unless you intend to do well at it. I’ve yet to decide what a “decent time” really means. If I’m honest, the main challenges are going to be discipline (I’m not very good at making the time for running, and this is not the first time I’ve formulated good intentions of this kind) and injuries, as I’ve had a mild case of Plantar Fasciitis that resurfaces every time I go for a run, and my left knee hurts after exercise – I don’t think either of these issues is particularly major and I hope they don’t get in the way of my training.

I went for a run with a friend this Saturday. We didn’t run very fast and we didn’t run very far (6.5 km), but the nice thing was that I felt very well immediately afterwards, and I’m hoping I can build on that. It was a very pleasant run along the banks of the Seine in Paris. I’ll be including links to the runs I do on gmap-pedometer.com, Saturday’s run is here.

I’ll also keep track of my body. The overall goal is to improve my health, and so hopefully I’ll be able to see and measure that improvement. At the moment, I weigh 72kg, and my fancy but temperamental body-fat monitoring scales in my bathroom give me a body fat percentage of somewhere between 16% and 17.5% depending on the day. My BMI is 22.7.