welsh hills again

The night before the Chester 10k I spent the whole evening grumping stompily about the house. What on earth was I thinking? Why on earth had I set myself up to do this? In November when we registered for the 10k my running was going well. Yes I was super slow but I was running three times a week and slowly getting faster and going further. Ian promised to run with me. There were months to go before the end of March. We had shared a bottle of wine and were sitting in bed with the details of the Chester 10k on the ipad. "Come on. I'll run with you," said Ian. Yes ok then, why not? But when March arrived nothing had gone to plan. I had taken five weeks off training with first a sore knee and then a chest infection. I had tried to get back and been running again for four or five weeks but I was way behind in what I had intended to do. The furthest I had run since starting again was 7k. I really didn't think I could do 10k. I was just going to embarrass myself. Stomp, ...

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 pro...

Well a whole month has whizzed away since I last blogged and its hard to know where the time has gone:  a visit from a dear friend who lives in France was the focus of the beginning of July.  I love the way that a visitor makes us get out into this lovely part of the world in which we live rather than gardening and working and sticking to our admittedly delightful routine.  A highlight was a walk on the beach at Newborough Warren in Anglesey  (Llanddwyn in Welsh) and a meal at Dylan's in Menai Bridge looking out over the water.  Newborough Warren is large and wild, fringed by pine forest which is home to red squirrels, and crowned by an island accessible at low tide.  You can look across the sea to the mountains of Snowdonia or away out west towards Ireland.  Why do I love the west?  I do not really know but the North West, Wales and west Wales, North West Scotland and the South West of England all draw me and the sun going down over the sea alway...

It is a month since I did that first parkrun, a month where I had a few days off for a sore knee and later a week off for a bad sore throat.  In between times I have tried to keep up with my running but I was starting to feel intimidated by the idea of parkrun and I thought I had better do another one, quick, before I began to feel that it was beyond me.  Part of the problem of having run one now is that I do know quite how hard it is, not for everyone but for me! So this morning off we went.  It was a bright clear day, sunny but cool, perfect running conditions.  I really didn't feel like going.  This was one of those occasions, of which there are many, where the fact that Ian and I were going out together helped to keep me on track.  I suspect that either of us might have slipped away and not done it if we had been on our own, but somehow neither of us said "Shall we just not bother" and so off we went. There were fewer people than the last time I ran...

When I started this running lark in January I had no ambition to run real distances.  I didn't want to run a marathon but I did think I would like to run 5k, maybe, if I could.    Going from being unable to run at all to running for thirty minutes, using the wonderful Couch to 5k app, was amazing.  I never thought I could run for thirty minutes without stopping.  In the early weeks I was daunted by the idea of running for five minutes!  But I did it and a few weeks ago I found I was able to keep going.  I was astonished.  I was delighted. But I am slow, the original snail runner.  When I completed Couch to 5k a few weeks ago I could indeed run for thirty minutes (yay!) but I was running just over 3k in that time.  I have got up to about 3.7k  but I had never run for 5k (actually I think I might have once, when I was about twenty nine, so around thirty five years ago) when I arrived at Bodelwyddan Castle this morning to do my first...

For the first time the programme for this week had no intervals of walking and running and it was all running.  I think mixed fortunes is the best way to describe how week seven went.  I decided to do the first run of the week by walking down the steep track to the river in the valley and treating the walk down as my warm up.  I did not get this quite right.  I tried to time it so that I didn't start the five minute count down until I was far enough down the hill to begin running near the bottom.  The change from walking to running actually happened just a little too soon as I got to a house on the right of the track and here the track was very deeply rutted and muddy so the first few minutes of running were not pleasant.  When I got to my usual running place all was well and I managed the twenty five minutes of running without a hitch.  I walked back up the track, treating that as my cool down, feeling pretty smug.  Too smug, too soon.  When...

It felt like a bit of a come down this week to go out for my first run of the week and find it was meant to be two runs of eight minutes each with a walk in between.  I was on such a high after I managed to do my twenty minutes last week that I was expecting to do more.  I am sure there is method in the madness of whoever put the couch to 5k programme together.  Certainly run number one felt easy enough.  I ran down by the river again and contemplated the fact that it would become very boring if I never ran anywhere else! Run 2 was on Saturday after a busy Friday where we had a lunch out in Manchester and a meal with friends in the evening.  I had been the designated driver so I hadn't had anything to drink but we had taken in a lot of food over the course of the day.  Perhaps that was why I felt so sluggish and slow.  This one was two runs of ten minutes each with a walk in between.  I suppose I had been due a bad run.  I hadn't really had...