"Are you alright?” people ask with concern when I get to the top of some stairs with them, or walk up a hill. "Just a bit out of breath” I’ll say. I remember the metal stairs up the Eiffel Tower last summer, how it seemed like shoals of people had been training for these steps which left me feeling as deflated and greasy as a ham and cheese croissant melting in the heat. It’s safe to say that I am unfit. I have been unfitter for a longer time than usual lately, though since I was twenty or so, I have been through various phases of "Get-Fitness”. Some have involved step classes, some have involved a gym and two involved the Great North Run. (2002 and 2005). Doing my funny poems on stage in the summer of 2005 I got a big laugh by joking that I was a poor advert for both my therapist and my personal trainer. That wouldn’t have been as funny if I’d looked a bit more like a honed, toned, running machine.

In one way, I have a brilliant excuse for not being that. No one expects poets to be fit. We’re supposed to have sensitive, easily broken hearts, not ones that have an efficient cardiac pumping rate. I am also a comedian and they’re expected to have funny bones not sensible muscles. A comedian’s exercise should consist of lifting a pint and a poet’s should consist of lifting a pen, so either way, I’m not interfering too much with the natural order of things. Except of course, there is the persistent social pressure to be an acceptable size, not to be too much of a burden on the NHS, not to be one of the people whose several stomachs the camera pans down on the street when the telly news does another feature on "BRITAIN’S OBESITY! CRISIS!”. Not being a natural joiner in, I try resist some of this pressure. I’m the bride who managed to put on a stone in the run up to my wedding for goodness sake. And yet...and yet...I jumped at the chance to enter another fitness phase and do the Great North Run again this year. It didn’t feel like social pressure was bearing down on me- just my own increasing urge to feel better and be stronger after a few years of sitting on any urges to get fit- and my bottom.

I’ll be writing along the way. I’m quite interested to see if I can complete a poem while I’m running the Great North Run - but I don’t know yet if that’s realistic. I can write quickly - that’s why I sometimes get asked to write poems about events while they’re happening - like the Great North Run Hall of Fame event one above - but I don’t know yet how closely my running self and my writing self are linked. I’ll be writing poems about my training journey though and have started with "You Don’t Look Like A Runner”. I’m hoping to post another couple a month as a sort of alternative record of my training progress (I hate spreadsheets of numbers and times- they remind me of maths exams).

I’ve signed up to one of the online training plans you can get from the Great North Run website and am currently getting emails every other day telling me to do a ten-fifteen minute easy walk/run. After three weeks I already seem to have more breath left at the top of the stairs-and some spare to put into poems. Titles have been coming to me while I’m running - I hope they’re poems that might make sense to you if you’re training too and I’d love to hear your thoughts so perhaps we can encourage each other as we go along...