A last-minute decision to have a long weekend away perhaps isn’t the best idea if you’re looking to gain momentum with physical fitness goals. I went to see Arsenal against Liverpool on Sunday, the 7th (so I decided to also see Chelsea play the day before). So I ended up going 5 days without doing a run. Perhaps it would have been okay if I was able to show some discipline and organisation…ah well.
I have a minor niggling foot injury which I’m waiting on an appointment for to try to get sorted. In the meantime, I’ve decided I will try to mix up the runs with other forms of exercise, such as swimming. I did a swimming test on January 3rd whereby I counted the number of lengths I could do in half an hour. I managed 32 lengths (800 metres). This wouldn’t be too impressive to any regular swimmers, to say the least, but I was happy with this all the same (as I have a test under my belt and can use this number to set goals in the future).
I had only done 2 runs in the first 9 days. However, I managed to get 4 runs done over the last 5 days to bring the total distance of the runs up to 46 kilometres for the first two weeks of the year. This included a running fitness test whereby I did 8 kilometres in a local park (trying to keep my heart rate at 149 beats per minute). This test shows that my current aerobic running speed is 6 minutes & 45 seconds per kilometre. I’ll discuss this low heart rate approach more in due course on the blog for anyone who may be interested in trying this approach to improve their fitness.
I’ve also booked my place for the Southampton Marathon in April.
All in all, I was a bit hit-and-miss for the first two weeks, but I have picked up some momentum over the last 5 days and will try to build on this momentum for the 2nd half of January.
