I’ve missed you and I’m sorry I forgot my bra.

[HelenkaZ]

I’m talking about my local park – what did you think I meant ?

After recently graduating and with the turn of the clocks, darker nights and the subsequent earlier closing of the gates in the local park; I have been consigned to the uneven pavements of Cardiff. Booooo. Blows raspberry. I’m not minding the cold or indeed the dark so much but after having been thoroughly spoiled by a flat and continuous running platform; I’m finding the adjustment to the new surface and stops for crossing the road a bit of a challenge. Ok – if I’m honest, the crossing the road stops are not always entirely unwelcome, but I do have more pronounced concerns for my knees and ankles that quite plainly need more strengthening. Keeping a very watchful eye on my left knee that has in the last few days been giving the feeling that it wants to ‘give way’.

When I have run on a Saturday in previous weeks for some reason I have found them to be ummm… ‘problematic’ and it was starting to become to a bit of an issue. However this Saturday I spontaneously (ish) decided it was time (again) to try and break the Strictly sorry, just Saturday curse and the almost inevitable associated psychological hurdle. Woop - dee – doo, at last - hurdle jumped in cold but also very colourful leafy surroundings. However, note to self: always take those extra few minutes before going out to change in to a proper sports bra and adjust and check, re-check and then re-re-check your laces, both of which failure to do can become unwanted distractions. Failure to do the latter also puts the kybosh on the accuracy of your times that you now carefully record on a spreadsheet. Does that stop count? How long was it ? Should I adjust the times for .2km of a loss for that? Is that cheating? Am I over thinking things too much? Of course I am. And let’s face it, we all know that you can usually make statistics confess to anything you want if you torture them for long enough.

Yes – the spreadsheet might be a bit of a nerdy thing to do but I found the hand written notes and reminders I kept in the C25K weeks so helpful, I thought I’d continue it in a more legible format (minus the tea stains, Amazon order numbers and 'forget yee not' scribblings to buy more Jaffa cakes). It’s the progress and indeed more so the evidence of my maintenance of running that I’m more interested in tracking and keeping watchful eye on. Now – decision to be made. Do I dare join the gym to access a dreadmill and commit to this whole thing financially? It’s either now or in March when the New Year peak application rates starts to subside.

[UnfitNoMore Graduate]

Nice post... our parks don’t close as such but I’ve been forced onto paths in the evenings now as the big green bits are mostly pitch black bits now.

I don’t keep a spreadsheet, but I do track and add comments to each run that I do... it’s nice to read back to both laugh at my old self, or see what was better and worse on two runs. I’m not addicted to all this, honest... but when I do two same length run in the exact same time I can’t help but look at the splits.

As for the gym... I’m now thinking a couple of day passes a week until Spring will be about the same as a membership and once the snow and ice have gone I’d be paying for the gym I wasn’t using all the way through to next winter. If anything I’ll buy a dreadmill... but I may change over to the Nike Training app, and follow a fitness plan, which will give me one run a week to do, and keep my hand in... I can’t remember the last time I wouldn’t have been able to run once in 7 days.