December 2023

December, then. Thirty-one activities and just under twenty-five hours of movement, which sounds impressive until you realise that eighteen of those activities were walks. To be fair, with the days in the UK shrinking to what feels like about forty minutes of usable daylight, getting outside with a podcast and logging a Lunch Walk or an Afternoon Walk became my primary survival strategy for both fitness and sanity. I did manage seven runs on the treadmill — 35 kilometres at an average of 5:28 per kilometre — and six Morning HIIT sessions to keep things honest, so it wasn't all gentle strolling. The walks themselves were actually no joke: 111 kilometres and nearly 1,600 metres of elevation across the month, which I'm choosing to count as proper training rather than just avoiding my desk.

So compared to November, the picture is a familiar one. I did less of the hard stuff — runs dropped from ten sessions and 43 kilometres down to seven and 35, and the HIIT count slipped by one — and more of the easy stuff, with walking time nearly doubling from 719 minutes to 1,188. I'd like to say this was a carefully periodised recovery block, but honestly December in Britain has a way of making the treadmill feel like a very loud, public place when the sofa is right there. The encouraging thing, if I squint at it, is that I kept showing up at all — 31 activities is still 31 activities. Whether that's a platform to build something meaningful on in January or just a number I'm hiding behind, I suppose we'll find out.

Summary generated by Claude