welsh hills again

A mixed up sort of week!  On Saturday last we went to Florence for a few days.  My niece has been studying there this year and we went to catch up with her, to revisit Florence and to have a few days away. It was cold at home in Wales once you left the warmth of the woodburner.  Italy was cloudy but milder and as we travelled by bus from Pisa airport to Florence there was blossom piled on the bare branches of trees.  I don't think I have been to Italy this early in the year before.  The grass was still green.  Even without the sun there was a faint sense of spring around the corner.  We had booked a place to stay through Airbnb, which we use a lot when we travel.  It was about forty minutes walk from the station or a taxi ride.  We walk a lot when we are in foreign cities so we walked there, in default mode, although by the time we arrived I was tired and hungry.  It seemed a long time since we had left home that morning when we fina...

The last week of the couch to 5K programme!  Amazing but true. This week is three runs of thirty minutes each.  For run number one we went to a Pilates class before going down to the coast.  The class seemed hard enough itself never mind following it with a run.  Whose idea was that?  Ah, sadly it was mine so no one to blame but myself!  The first ten minutes or so felt really hard.  My legs were heavy and slow and the whole thing felt like a struggle.  But the sun was shining and the tide was out and children were running or building castles on the sand.  I had the Strava app running again on my phone to see if I could run any faster.  To be honest the idea of running any faster at all seemed ludicrous.  The prom is made of concrete sections, all the same size.  Ian had mentioned to me the idea of using this to count my strides and to see if I could lengthen  my stride.  I found that in the second ten minutes I cou...