You can run with us, we've got everything you need

I don't run often. But tonight I ran for a bus and I enjoyed it.

I first joined a gym about five years ago. It came as something as a shock to me, as a lifetime of being picked last for any sort of team sport (yes, I was one of those kids at school) had left me with the impression that exercise was an activity best avoided at all costs. Naturally a gym was the last place I expected to find myself. However, fortune saw fit to provide me with a free week long pass at the gym next door to the office where I worked at the time and, for reasons that entirely escape me now and which I'm sure went against my better judgement then, I decided to see what this exercise lark was all about. Actually, that may not be entirely true - unusually for me, my motives may have been a little stronger than mere whim this time. I'd fallen into a routine, back then, which left me scant time for any sort of strenuous activity and I knew that unless something changed, I was a likely candidate for terminal couch potato status. For various reasons, the downsides had started to weigh upon me and consequently I'd been toying with ideas for escaping that particular groove. I'd been lacking the motivation to do much about it, though, until the free pass came up. I confess that I didn't expect to be able to outpace my carefully constructed set of prejudices on the subject of exercise, but I was probably more open minded about the matter than I had been at any time in my life prior.

My intent, when I started at the gym, was to do lots of cardiovascular exercises - to put to good use the treadmills and exercise bikes and other assorted instruments of torture that litter most gyms. I tried to get on with them, truly I did, but, no matter what I attempted, I found myself counting the seconds as I used each of the machines. You see, repetition bores me. I can stand it for a little while, but to do the same thing over and over for more than a few minutes at a time is anathema to me. My mind refuses to allow itself to concentrate on anything save for the fact that I'm doing something I don't want to be doing and time slows to a crawl. It's not fun. Largely for this reason, I found myself edging slowly away from the treadmills and started looking at weights instead.

Which brings me back to running, curiously enough. I can't run for long. It's not that I can't, but rather that I won't. As I've intimated, long distance running is nothing less than my idea of pure torture. But running in short bursts is an entirely different matter. Not only can I do it, but I actually enjoy sprinting. I think it's why I've enjoyed weight training so much. The emphasis is on short bursts of activity, rather than the long, drawn out nature of cardiovascular exercise. Unfortunately, there's little scope for it in my day to day life. Gyms don't seem to be geared for it - rather sadistically, them seem to prefer drawing out that pain. But there are small spaces where I just can't resist. There's a travelator, for example, that runs down a corridor connecting the new Jubilee line extension to the tube at Waterloo. The corridor is probably about a hundred meters or so in length and, since it's a modern extension, it's surprisingly spacious - there's even a wide aisle dividing the two travelators, which are normally filled to capacity, especially during rush hour. Naturally, the fastest way to travel from one end to the other is to give up on the travelators, abandon any form of decorum and simply bolt down the center aisle. That people stare as I do so is only an added bonus. But even that's not a route I take often. Tonight, however, I found myself waiting for a bus. This is something I do considerably more often. Lacking anything to read, I instead amused myself by racing between bus stops whilst waiting for the bus to appear. Unfortunately, the bus won out in the first instance, but it still made the wait vastly more fun, and it's rarely long until the next one comes along - buses are uncharacteristically efficient in London right now.

I think I'll continue to race buses. Perhaps I'll win next time.

P.S Bonus points for anyone who can identify the origin of this entry's title.