For clarity, I’m not talking about my running kit, which simply got dried, aired and returned to the kit draw unwashed after my New Year run 🙂 but rather that I simply ran the same circuit again.
I’ve had a really creative week as, aside from working on an interesting commercial cognitive challenge, I’ve returned to the amazing Lucas Cook for another round of guitar lessons.
I first met Lucas 11 years ago, at the start of January 2010, having decided that I would work to improve my guitar playing after 35 years of playing badly. Our collaboration started as an experiment, based on the writing of Julia Cameron, and aside from the development of a treasured friendship, has proved to be a very good investment in time! More recently Lucas has developed an online tuition model, which has opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities.
This week we had three short Zoom sessions where he essentially worked as a producer to help me develop a new piece of music. This time last week it didn’t exist in any form, but this morning I was comfortably playing a composition that I had not only developed, but is really ear-catching… the kind of music that never dared dream that I would be able to play, let alone compose.
So it was with this tune running around in my head that I set out into a one degree Celsius world outside.
I’ve definitely felt more cognitively and physically alive this last week and I attribute a good proportion of this to my New Year’s run, so my aim was simply to run the circuit again to start to rebuild muscle tone. I used to occasionally run a mile or two in my work shoes if I really wanted to catch a train, so there’s nothing to write home about the distance, but it’s a dramatic improvement given my declining mileage and physical form over the last few years.
Last week the circuit was 1.99 miles, but at one point today I decided to divert rather than wait for a covid-19 standoff to resolve itself between a lady with a dog and a man with a toddler. The lady had pinned herself up against one side of the path, the man had the territory on the other side and the toddler, oblivious of current social-distancing etiquette, happily occupied the centre of the path in his toy car… it looked like they might be there for a while!
The diversion took my mileage to 2.04 miles and at a very slightly faster pace than last week, but we’ll call it 2 miles in 20 minutes for ease. I’ve since dried & aired my running kit and once again returned it unwashed to the kit draw… in the hope that I will get it back out again at some point next week.
