If I think back to all the crazy antics I’ve got up to in the early hours of New Years Day over the years, wow it makes me shudder and smile in equal measure.
A couple of years back I actually saw two “Happy New Year” moments as I crossed a time zone in South East Asia whilst backpacking, seeing NY come in on an aeroplane over the sky of Kuala Lumpa and then again i on the streets of Medan, in Indonesia about forty minutes or so later.
I once had to ask a black cab to stop in broad daylight on Tower Bridge on the way home from a club so I could vomit out the door. He kindly passed me back a tissue and some gum which I thought was very generous considering the circumstances.
I remember waiting for a 108 bus (a single decker job) to pull into North Greenwich station on NYE 2002 to find approximately 20,000 revellers trying to get north of the river after raving it up in an empty Millennium Dome. We were having a cold spell that year. It was minus 10 or something and I was wearing a backless top and a short skirt…I did have a scarf though!!
Oh and then there was the time we all went to Southend for a club night and I lost all my friends and had to wait for the first train home, I was wearing a ridiculous fake fur coat and elbow length black satin gloves and shoes which had given me blisters.
There was loitering in Central London to watch the fireworks in 2000, numerous house parties in Forest Gate, nights out in Shoreditch, paying silly money to go Ministry of Sound one year (big disappointment)…So many booze fuelled evenings seeing in the New Year, some great some not so great, some I clearly can’t even remember at all.
Last year I was 9 months pregnant and the size of the millennium done, but I still managed to take me and my load to a pub where my brother was DJing to see in the New Year. I lasted until about 12.30 and then went home, via McDonalds if I remember rightly.
Now I have a little one to keep me occupied my desire to go out in the rain and spend the evening with drunk strangers whilst spending silly amounts of money just for 10 seconds of excitement, well that desire has kinda disappeared. Like completely!!
So instead the 3 of us did the countdown, watched the fireworks out of our window, took a selfie and then by 1am we were all tucked up cosy in bed.
Which meant….
That this morning I did my first ever New Years Day 5k…a parkrun. No a very muddy, very windy, very cold parkrun. Just look at the state of my new trail shoes huh…
It took me 37minutes and 37 seconds to get round, which wasn’t bad considering I almost lost my shoe at one point and spent a good deal of the time skating in mud as opposed to trotting through the woods. And there were a good few hundred other crazy folk up early in the cold doing exactly the same, obviously running a lot quicker than me, some of them even going on to do a second parkrun which started an hour later.
As crazy as it was sliding around in the mud…It felt phenomenal.
What a start to 2014.
And all without a hangover too.
I am taking part in Janathon a month of jogging, blogging and logging…but maybe not in that order, oh and excuses. My plan is to do as much running as I possibly can during that time, over 50 kilometers is my target and when I can’t run I will do some other form of exercise instead.
Happy New Year Folks
I hope 2014 brings you everything you deserve.