September 2011

So September turned out to be a reasonable month by my recent standards, which admittedly isn't saying a great deal. Four runs, 22.5 kilometres, and 146 minutes of actually getting off the sofa — I'll take it. The pace crept down very slightly to around 6:30 per kilometre, which sounds like progress until you remember that's still not exactly setting the Thames on fire. The Morning Run was the one that stood out, mainly for the fact that I actually did it in the morning, which for me counts as a genuine achievement in its own right.

Compare that to August, where one solitary run of 6.3 kilometres was apparently enough to constitute a month of training, and suddenly September looks almost heroic. So the honest answer is that the cooler autumn air probably did more for my motivation than any actual discipline on my part — there's something about not sweating through your shirt before you've even reached the end of the road that helps. Four times out versus once is a significant improvement percentage-wise, even if the absolute numbers are still modest enough to make a proper runner wince. The direction of travel is right though, and if I can carry some of this momentum into October (a big if, given the dark mornings that are coming), there might actually be something to build on.

Summary generated by Claude