June 2019

So June, then. Twenty activities, 467 minutes of actual moving — which sounds respectable until you realise that's down from 627 minutes in May, and the half marathon I ran at Gatwick the month before rather flatters the comparison. The month ended up being a fairly even three-way split between riding, running and swimming, which at least suggests I'm keeping all the plates spinning even if none of them are spinning especially fast. The riding was mostly commutes to and from the gym (which does raise the philosophical question of whether cycling to a gym and then cycling home counts as training or just inefficient logistics), clocking 38 kilometres at a gentle average heart rate of 141 — nobody's setting any records there. The running was 43.5 kilometres across seven sessions, a fair chunk of it on treadmills judging by the lack of elevation, with a handful of hotel runs thrown in which usually means I was travelling for work and feeling vaguely virtuous about it.

So compared to May, the numbers tell a fairly honest story — 85 kilometres of running down to 43, twelve runs down to seven, and I'm not going to pretend that's a planned recovery week. May had a race in it, the Gatwick Half Marathon, which has a way of pulling everything else along with it; you train because there's something to train for. Take the race away and apparently I run about half as much, which teaches me something I probably already knew. The swimming has picked up at least — five sessions and seven kilometres versus three sessions and three kilometres in May — so perhaps I'm finding the pool more appealing as the summer arrives, or more likely the gym is air conditioned and June in England eventually gets warm enough to make that matter. Going forward, the question is whether I can find something to aim at before the diary fills up and the motivation quietly wanders off.

Summary generated by Claude