April 2019

So April turned out to be a fairly busy month by my recent standards — 28 activities and just shy of 15 hours of moving around, which feels like a lot until you remember that most of it was at a pace a determined tortoise could match. Running did the heavy lifting, with 10 runs covering 103.5 km (an average of just over 10 km a run, which I'm choosing to feel good about), though the 5:40 per km average pace suggests I was very much in the "comfortable suffering" zone rather than anything resembling quick. The cycling picked up nicely too, with 13 rides — mostly commuting, which at least means I was being virtuous by accident — and I squeezed in four pool swims and even a Junior Parkrun tailwalk, which is exactly as leisurely as it sounds. Thirty-three run PRs is a number I'm quietly pleased with, even if some of them were almost certainly set on Strava segments I'd forgotten I'd ever run before.

Compared to March, this was a meaningful step up — 17 activities versus 28, and 475 minutes versus 893, so roughly double the volume, which either reflects a genuine training build or the fact that April finally stopped feeling like the inside of a wet sock. The longer days and slightly less hostile weather almost certainly helped drag me out the door more consistently, and the cycling in particular went from four rides to thirteen, which is the kind of improvement that happens when you don't have to defrost the bike first. So the direction of travel is encouraging, and if I can avoid the usual combination of a hard week at work and a vague sense of existential fatigue derailing things, May could actually be worth writing about.

Summary generated by Claude