A long overdue update

I was astonished to find when I came back to my blog yesterday that it has been more than three months since I blogged.  In fact my Spanish friend asked me this morning if I only blogged in the summertime!  So many reasons:  busy with family and with selling the house (which is progressing but slowly) and the easy lure of Instagram which makes you feel you are connecting with people without the need to sit down and really think and write.  But I would miss it very much if I stopped so here is a download of what is in my head this cold and windy Tuesday up on my North Wales hillside.

Gulp.  Well I have somehow gone and done it and committed to doing a 10k run in Chester in March.  At the moment the idea of running for 10 kilometres is quite as daunting as the idea of running 5k was back in January when I started to try to learn to run using the Couch to 5K programme.  I have been idling along for the last few weeks, running a bit less because of a problem with a sore hip, trying not to stop because I really really don't want to give up but poddling along,  stuck in a rut and losing the momentum of that delightful sense of  improvement.  It is Ian's fault that we have booked to run the 10k.   He was looking at the race details and we were talking about it and I was saying that I wasn't sure how I would feel about coming last, which feels pretty inevitable based on how slow I am.

"You won't come last," he said.  "We will run together and if I am in front of you at the end and you are last I will just slip in behind you."

For some reason I thought this was so funny that I found myself agreeing and now we have paid and the email arrived this morning confirming the place.  Slightly terrifyingly it warns you that if it looks as though you will take longer than one hour and thirty minutes to finish you may be asked to withdraw "for your own safety"!  I will definitely be somewhere around that, even assuming I can get to 10k.  So far the furthest I have run is 8k and that was about six weeks ago before I had my hip problem.

So I spent the rest of last night looking at training programmes for running 10k and finding nothing aimed at the slightly overweight sixty five year old who likes a glass of wine.  Everyone seems to be younger and fitter and faster so I decided that the thing to do was to rely on the programme on https://healthunlocked.com/bridgeto10k , a really wonderful forum for running after couch to 5k which has kept me going whenever I have felt I was out of my depth.  And the forum itself is supportive, hugely encouraging and has lots of members who, while they might be fitter and faster than I am, are, many of them, in my own age group.  They might just get me there!

So this morning I did my Spanish conversation with my friend from Valencia, spent an hour or so in the kitchen afterwards making tonight's meal and then put on my running things and headed out for half an hour.  It was cold.  I had decided to run 4k (well the magic running plan had decided that for me) and to try to do a couple of intervals of faster running than my norm during that time.  Well actually I had decided to do three faster intervals but I could only manage two.  It took me time to get my breath and the first ten minutes of this morning's run is gently up hill.  Up hill I can manage, just, but not at anything other than a snail's pace.

But I did it and I felt good afterwards, as I always do.  This afternoon had a bit of grandchild time in it and this evening I am going to watch Rick Stein in France.  Life is good.