welsh hills again

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...

One of the things I love about having blogged for so many years is that I can look back on how things were and how things are now.  I know in my head that our garden was a field when we came fourteen years ago.  But it is hard to remember how it was.  What I see when I wander around has come about so slowly that I have lost the sense of how it was.  This picture shows the native tree bed at the bottom of our field.  It was planted first with trees and dogwoods about ten years ago.  In the picture above the bed is about three years old, with snowdrops beginning to spread and the dogwoods starting to grow. This is how it looks now, ten years on,  the trees large and shady, the dogwoods growing and the hellebores in full flower.   The trees tower above your head.  It is hard to think that they have not always been there. It is so easy to forget how things change.  This picture shows the newly planted orchard in spring...

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...