Month: November 2022

Posted on

Steadily does it :-)

With three weeks since my last run, I decided that it was more important to take it steady today and enjoy myself… which I did!

Whilst it wasn’t so warm wearing shorts and a t-shirt, a weak sun was pushing through the greyness which, along with a hat and gloves, made the temperature bearable.

I focused on flowing along gently and had none of the heavy footedness that I was experiencing a few months ago. In fact, I could easily have run further… although I can’t deny that it was a relief to get back in the warm 🙂

So, a smidge over 2 miles (I ran to the door and the warmth behind it 🙂 in just under 20 minutes. That’s not as fast as the last couple of runs, but only on the outbound leg, running up the hill… on the way back I actually matched the pace of the last two runs, which is pretty amazing given that I thought I was taking it steady!

Life is about to change here to some extent with both a new role and house guests imminent. New constraints always help to shine a light on the old routines and drive creative thinking about new ways of doing things, making for both exciting and daunting times ahead 🙂

No pictures of the run today, but enclosing one of my Mum’s Jade plant / Money plant, which has suddenly decided to flower. This is a really rare event, so I’ll take it as a good sign 🙂

Posted on

Flippity floppity does it :-)

It’s been feeling somewhat chilly in the house lately, which has less to do with the weather than because we had reduced the heating from seven to two hours a day… one in the morning & one in the evening.

Er… at least that was what I thought I had done. In fact I just realised it was only coming on for 30 minutes in the morning and given that it’s not been particularly comfortable I’ve just increased it to 1 hour in the morning & 90 minutes in the evening.

Suffice to say that this morning it was definitely warmer outside than inside, so I was still able to do my short run in a t-shirt & shorts.

Recently, after around 20 years of doing short daily Qigong / chi-gung body & breathing exercises, the words of my original tutor (Dan, I think) finally sank in… the movements are supposed to be slow, flowing and soft, such that someone could easily deflect your arm.

At least I think that’s what he meant… it was a long time ago and I won’t bore you with the back-story about why it suddenly came to mind again!

Suffice to say that. as someone who suffers from perpetually taut muscles & tendons, cultivating that flippity-floppiness is actually really useful, even though I don’t find it easy!

Long-story-short, I managed to bring a little of that flippity-floppityness to my run today and it helped me to stretch my stride out a little.

My time was a touch slower on the way up the hill than last time, but still ahead of the recent runs before that… coming back down was an exact match for last time, which I’m really happy with. So, just under 2 miles in 19:21.