For those who regularly check the website to look for a new post, you may have noticed something a little strange. I haven’t posted for a few months. There’s hasn’t even been a monthly miles round up, which can sometimes be the only thing that I post that month. However over summer there’s been nothing.
Now there’s nothing to blame for this except me. I just haven’t been putting in the work to sustain the blog. I could have pre-prepared posts and scheduled them to upload during the summer period. I didn’t though, and as such it has suffered. Today that stops though. I have a renewed vigour and will be aiming to post at least every two weeks.
SO WHERE WAS I?
As you may know I teach dance throughout the school year, which leaves summer a little bare. Instead I supervised a holiday camp for 5 weeks over summer, cycling to the location every most days, taking about 2 hours there and back. This left little room for more fitness related activities. Unless I wanted to feel completely exhausted. I tried keeping my running schedule to a pared down version with 3/4 runs every week to complete my 84km goal each month. Very quickly it became clear that this was not sustainable though. Between getting back, cooking tea, organising my food for the next day and then trying to relax before sleeping (8:30pm – early I know! I was waking at 5:30), I felt I couldn’t add another activity to the schedule. So I re-jigged and chose to run 15km in one go, on a treadmill. Let’s just say it wasn’t the best decision of my life, but I did it, and just decided, again it wasn’t going to last. Instead I just took it day my day and running was just kind of pushed from the fore front of my mind.
I had a little reprieve when I went away for a conference, and ran a couple of times whilst in Birmingham. These runs were super speedy though, and almost made me think I had gone out way too fast, and then I got a little anxious that I wouldn’t be able to get back to that moving pace again. Which seems crazy. At the end of that week I also had a trip to Devon and fitted in a Parkrun and a 10km Recce, both done at a comfortable pace in order to slow myself down and not cause injury as I was fearing my runs earlier in the week may have done.
After that, I settled back into the routine of Summer Camp, with one difference; my bike broke. Not completely but a couple of cables needed replacing, and the back brake pad kept slipping out. The latter being the biggest issue. I also became a little ill, perhaps because of the longer commute via the bus, but maybe also because of fatigue. Either way, I didn’t cycle that whole week. The last week, I only took the bus once, and then I tried to do a little run to the bus stop and towards my house. It didn’t go great but it was a start. So that’s where we’re at. My schedule is now becoming a lot better, as my dance school return to term time, and so I can now finally get back to running in the morning.
WHAT AM I DOING NOW?
So my plan is to ease back into it, the last proper run I did outside my calves tensed up so bad, so I’m on the treadmill this week, but hopefully Saturday I’ll make it out to a Parkrun. I’ve also challenged myself to run everyday of September. To complete I need to run at least 2km on that day, with this being the third day I’ve so far done 2km, and 5km, with another 5km planned this afternoon on the treadmill. I’ve a lot of races in September so I’ve got a lot to ‘train’ for. I’m booking my next year of races at the moment which should inform my next block of training, but for now my goal is just to get back into it, before winter starts, especially because Autumn is my favourite time to run.
I’m also in the process of starting some running groups, I’m just awaiting for permission from the council to use some of the local parks as a base for them. So fingers crossed that I’ll be able to put my running leadership into use!
As always you can find me on Strava, Instagram, and Facebook. So be sure to get involved! Also send me lots of motivation, I might be in need of it soon.
RADanceFitness 