Monday 24 May 2010

Revelations.

It turns out that starting a blog and telling people about this was the easy bit of the challenge. Who knew?!

I've just kicked off on the first stage of the proper training, which will hopefully have me walking my first marathon in September. Like a lot of running programmes, I'm meant to complete three short sections a week and one long one, with three rest days in between the weekday walks. In practice, I imagine I'll end up dropping a couple of walks along the way to fit in with other exercise and life in general.

So in this first week of official training, I'm meant to have walked 20 miles spread over four sessions. Did I do it?

Er, no, actually. I walked 15 miles spread over three sessions: a 3 mile, a 3.5 mile and an 8.5 mile. The fact is that it is hard to find time to do this - a 4 mile walk is all fine, but you've got to take a good hour out of your day to do it. And you've got to remember to take your shoes with you so you can.

It's rather frustrating that I'm not even hitting target in my first week, but at least I know it's not due to anything more than life getting in the way. I'm fit, healthy and quite happy to bound from one mile to the next. I'm hoping that this momentum will keep up with me as I start on this 22 mile target week.

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More for my record than anything else, I'm keeping a Daytum page to record the mileage I clock up - this suits my nerdy brain very well and as a by-product gives me a sense of achievement on updating. I keep one for another project I have running in the background (my 101 things in 1001 days list) and it's helped with motivation on that too. I love it.

2 comments:

  1. I know what you mean about the whole time thing, especially on the long ones and I find it bad enough with running the miles let alone walking! Maybe if it's time you should start cooking or knitting while you walk :D
    Good thing to clock up your mileage, most fun to plot on a map and then realised how far you have walked, very satisfying!

    Claireyx

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  2. You know, I was out on that walk on Sunday evening and it was starting to get dark and I thought 'ooo! I could run for a bit! That'd get it finished quicker!'. And then I saw sense. :P

    I'm experimenting with mapmywalk.com to plot where I'm wandering. I've found it quite handy for setting up routes as well as measuring what I've already done.

    Kxx

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