Things I hate: Running

The wind in your hair, the solitude of the trail, the feel of warm Vaseline slowly evaporating around your genitals. Yeah: running is awful. 85% of the time spent running is done wishing your shins would stop aching, your nipples would stop bleeding and shiftless children would stop heckling your diminutive spandex knob.

For city dwellers, maintaining a runner’s lifestyle is an arduous undertaking. For many of us the luxury of rolling hills are a fantasy. Instead we’re to make do with whatever shit-smeared, graffitied patch of gangland greenery we can find. This has a tendency to throw some rather horrific hurdles in our already strenuous path.

Here are the top five perils of the urban runner:

Children

I’m sure the collective noun for a group of children is a bastard. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of the urban runner like spotting a bastard of children. As you correct a bitter posture, mop your brow and attempt to emulate an Ironman in training you’re suddenly aware of your incredibly erect nipples. The bastard can smell fear as you approach. ‘Nice tits!’ one of them shouts. ‘You look gay!’ says another. ‘YOUR MUM!’ comes your caustic riposte. Your heavy panting/crying does little to drown out their jeering as you resume the gait of a great clunking nerd.

The omnipresence of junk food

Inevitably your city route will take you past junk food and drink. More often than not, only drunks shovel that dross into their maw. However, there’s something about the smell of junk food that’s strangely seductive when you’re running. Everything bad smells good: beer, exhaust fumes, tramps, even Chinese food. To make matters worse, the people gorging themselves see the lust in your eyes, staring out from their luminescent glut-houses. Them necking carbs; you, healthy, yet far closer to death and dribbling, face pressed up against the window like a pig snorting for truffles.

Animals

I’m a dog person, provided the owner doesn’t see runners as one big sweaty tennis ball for their beloved Killer. Dogs, however, are pussycats. The real shits are geese. Canadian ones. Vicious, territorial, hissing gits of the towpath. Canadian geese casually flap around all nonchalant and dumb, then, as soon as they see you coming it’s as if you’ve tried to chat up their bird in a nightclub. If you’re to tackle geese, you need to be big. If they prepare to attack, throw your hands in the air. People will think you’re loco, but they’ll have nothing but respect once they see how flawlessly you’ve dismissed those winged hell beasts.

Clothes

With every Matt, Dan and Alex running around in tracky-b’s, a wife beater and a classic Adidas hoodie from JD Sports, you’d be mistaken for assuming that you’ll look like anything other than a complete dick strutting around in the latest threads from Nike. The T-shirt you’d normally reserve for the painting and decorating won’t cut it with the city runners. You need to spend a fortune on the latest material from NASA in order to put the running Nazis off the scent of fresh meat. Sadly, no running clothes look good. Gone are the days when you’d look like the slightly rotund member of Run-DMC.

Runners

If a group of children is a bastard, a group of runners is a twat. Spying a twat of runners elicits much the same response as spotting a bastard of children, except scorn replaces fear. They effortlessly patrol the towpath like a pack of Lycra-clad vigilantes, yelling things such as ‘on your right, feeble pedestrian!’ as they barge you into the canal. One of them appears to be smoking, another either has the post-run bananas, or he’s just really happy to be running. Effortlessly fit, they represent everything you’re not. They’ll post their personal best on Facebook.

What’s putting you off going for a run, you fat slob?