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...

Well week 8 of Couch to 5k means we are coming towards the end.  Only one more week after this one! Week 8 required three runs of 28 minutes each.  I had decided to try to make it easy for myself with run one so it was back to the riverside to the running area where I did most of my early training.  I was really hoping to find it easier and this one was not too bad.  I ran really slowly and it was absolutely flat.  Even so the first ten minutes was a slog until I began to warm up and get into my stride.  I think I expect too much and imagine that because I have got this far I must be on the edge of  a breakthrough into finding running comfortable and easy.  Not so.  But it was doable and I decided to treat myself to a couple of easier runs as a sort of consolidation.  So run two was more of the same.  This time I had downloaded Strava onto my phone because I wanted to get some idea of how fast I was running.  How slowly more ...

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...

I was on a real high after run two of week five, having achieved two runs of eight minutes each.  The next run was meant to be twenty minutes long.  How could that be?  And yet while I was daunted I was also really interested to see whether I could do it.  The Couch to 5k programme hadn't let me down yet so maybe, just maybe, it was doable?  After all they would hardly set people up to fail would they? So I was all ready for Thursday last week and what felt to me like the breakthrough between trying to learn how to run and actually running. And then it snowed. It looked very beautiful but it did not look like the kind of conditions I could run in. I thought I should do something to try to keep the fitness going so I had a go on our exercise bike.  I only managed about ten minutes.  I don't know what it is about the exercise bike but I really hate it.  I find it intensely boring and it feels intensely useless.  If I am outside...

The first run of week five and I was feeling quite close to keen to get on with it!  I have been away from home for a day or so visiting my brother in South Wales so I had missed two days rather than the one which the Couch to 5k programme requires.  I have developed a real fear of missing so many days that the small amount of progress I have made disappears and it feels as though I am starting from scratch so I was planning as I was driving back yesterday when and where to run today.  I decided to go down to the river again as I like the combination of flat land to run on and the variety of things to look at produced by the fields to one side of the track and the river to the other. It was cold again today so once again I layered up with my thermal vest and long johns underneath my running clothes. Some people get quite warm and sweaty when they run but I suspect I don't run fast enough to make myself sweat, certainly I have never been too warm when running! ...