January 2012

So January turned out to be a reasonably solid month, all things considered. Nine activities in total, with just under eleven hours of moving — split between seven runs covering 53.5km and a couple of rides that clocked up 61.2km between them (which, given that it's January in Britain, I'll take as a minor victory over the weather and my own instinct to stay on the sofa). The running has been ticking along at around six and a half minutes per kilometre, which is hardly elite pace, but the 629 metres of elevation suggests at least some of it was honest work. Thirteen run achievements and seven PRs feels like the kind of number that sounds impressive right up until you remember how low the bar was set going in.

December, by contrast, was a fairly grim picture — three runs, 17.8km, and not a great deal else to show for the month. So the step up to January is encouraging, even if "encouraging" is doing quite a lot of heavy lifting as a word when you're comparing nine sessions to three. Getting the bikes out again has helped; there's something about having two disciplines to play with that makes it easier to talk yourself out of bed on a dark morning when the run just doesn't appeal. The PRs suggest the fitness is there if I can keep building on it, which is obviously the plan — though if my recent history is anything to go by, February will have a few opinions of its own about that.

Summary generated by Claude