July 2013

So July turned out to be a reasonably productive month, all things considered. Twelve activities and just over seven hours of moving about in the sunshine, which for a British summer felt almost luxurious. The split was five rides covering nearly 74km, six runs adding up to just shy of 39km, and one open water swim — the OWS being the kind of thing that sounds more heroic than it probably was, given it clocked in at a grand total of two minutes of recorded activity (I suspect the Garmin and I had a brief disagreement about when things started). The riding was the real story though, racking up 22 personal records across those five sessions, which either means I've suddenly got considerably faster or, more likely, I hadn't been on the bike nearly enough before July.

Compared to June, which was a fairly thin five activities and just over two and a half hours, July was a meaningful step up — more than double the volume by time, and the running alone in July nearly doubled what I covered across the whole of June. The pace crept up slightly too, from 6:25 to 6:21 per kilometre, which I'll take. So the longer days and the absence of the usual excuse of it being dark and horrible at 6am clearly helped, because there's really no good reason not to go out when the sun's already up and judging you. The question now, as ever, is whether any of this momentum survives into August, or whether life quietly reasserts itself and we're back to heroic five-activity months.

Summary generated by Claude