It’s Saturday again and I find myself sitting to write about another pair of short runs on the machine, one on Tuesday and the other earlier today.
I felt comfortable running at 7mph for two minutes at the end of the session today, and whilst that’s not really anything to write home about (I’m sure that I remember being able to sprint at 14mph for a couple of minutes in years gone by), I feel that I’m progressing simply by turning up and putting one foot in front of the other, one run and then another.
I’ve been pondering the time aspect of habit maintenance… two minutes brushing teeth twice a day is easy, as is a five-minute shower… perish the thought that either don’t happen.
Amusingly, as these words tumbled out I realised that I didn’t actually brush this morning, because I jumped into housework mode first thing. I immediately felt the need to rectify the situation… my teeth are now sparkling clean, as I continue to write 🙂
My one-mile machine runs and blog posting, on the other hand, take more than 10 minutes and 20+ minutes respectively and despite the tremendous benefits of both, I’ve been finding them really hard to maintain recently.
It wasn’t always so. Several years ago I would spend a couple of hours running maybe 10 or 12 miles at the weekend, then spend most of the rest of the day recovering and writing… and then repeat the exercise with shorter runs during the week. I don’t feel the need to return to that at the moment, but it would be nice to be able to get back into the habit of doing at least a couple of short runs each week. Preferably outside.
Thanks to my hairdresser’s chiding I did actually manage to do two machine runs this week, but, as is clear from the title, only one piece of mediocre writing. Ho hum! Maybe it will be a little easier again next week.
What you might notice from the two photos below is that at least the time is slowly coming down. 🙂
