Peer Pressure

Now I’ve always thought of myself as someone who has their own mind, someone who isn’t easily swayed by others, but the more I think about it the more I accept that actually I often succum to peer pressure of one form or another.

I’m not a smoker, but I did experiement with smoking in the last year of school, but once everyone else started it, I lost the interest and realised it was cooler to be the kid that doesn’t smoke….and boy am I glad I did that.

I am very much encouraged to drink though by my girlfriends and my siblings too, and much of my socialising involves the consumption of copius amounts of alcohol, much to the dislike of my other half who considers himself a moderate drinker. Even when I say right I am not drinking tonight, or gonna take it steady I often find myself downing shots and saying “Ok just one more”

It has the same effect in terms of my exercising though. I have a group of friends that I have met through the various bootcamps (I’ll fill you in on those later) I’ve been on over the last 3 years. We were once known as the Fab Five, but Kimmy is now all the way in Australia and nursing a new baby but she is still an honoury member. But anyway since meeting in 2008 we have been signing up to runs on a regular basis, we do our own individual ones too, but we also pressurise each other to do races even when we don’t really want to do them… we always come round in the end.

It started with British 10K, then we progressed to the Paris 20K and then we went the whole hog and did a Kilomarathon – 26.3K from Nottingham to Derby, we’ve done about 10 races in all together I think, and Bev keeps trying to get us to sign up to a Marthon, but in truth shes the only one of us that does enough training for that to be a reality right now…but who knows, one day possibly.

Its a good idea though to have a bit of a fitness crew on your side, friends that you can compare notes with, challenge them to push themselves and of course go for a sneaky drink with after a session.

So just a big thanks to the Fab 4, to Nat and Tash who run with me occasionally, Faiby who tries his best and also to all my virtual friends new and old who are currently keeping me going too.

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