January 2017

So January turned out to be a fairly decent month, all things considered. Twenty-five runs, 125 kilometres, and 871 minutes of getting cold and questioning my life choices — not bad for the darkest, most miserable month the British calendar has to offer. The average pace came in at 6:57 per kilometre, which I'm choosing to frame as "steady and controlled" rather than "slow," and I managed to rack up a couple of personal records along the way, which was a pleasant surprise given how little I deserved them. The Morning Run sessions were the backbone of it all, early starts being the only real way to get miles in before the day swallows everything else whole.

December, by comparison, was something of a disaster — four runs, 16.5 kilometres, and an average pace that suggests I was essentially shuffling. To be fair to myself (and I rarely am), December is December, and the combination of festivities, a Parkrun that probably counts more as a social event than training, and the general entropy of the festive period makes consistency almost impossible. So going from 16 kilometres in a month to 125 is either a sign that January went well, or that December was worse than I'd admitted to myself — probably both. The slightly lower average heart rate this month suggests the fitness is actually coming back, which means the only sensible thing to do now is keep it going rather than let February undo all of it.

Summary generated by Claude