So I left off a month ago having decided to sign up to the Local HM in early October hoping it would shift me out of the doldrums.
Suddenly I find that I'm in week 3 of training with life having continued to be in the way until this week. I swear that this year had the longest summer term ever! I managed to fit in frequent short runs which is something. Many weekends have been dominated by preparations for Peak Camp, an international gathering of 6000 Guides and Scouts, and I've been one of the 1000 staff helping to make the event work. The camp itself wrote off week 2 of training which I reasonably expected, but in silver linings, it was a very active week even if it was constantly walking to water taps and toilet blocks rather than actually running.
So week 3 has really started in earnest. I did my long run mid-week on a child-free day. I opted to do it cross country so it was slow with extra hills and walking intervals, but longer in time than my plan. I thought that would be a lower impact way of getting used to a jump back to a longer time when I've done little above 35 minutes recently. Buggy Babes was also back on after several weeks of various interruptions. I followed up that day with a shorter run. I've used my other child-free day to go swimming. I'm a regular at the pool, but rarely for my own interests! I set an alarm to make sure that I made it to a lanes session, and enjoyed 55 minutes of pounding up and down a lane doing 60x 25m using mainly front crawl and some back stroke and breast stroke.
I've got similar opportunities again next week. Then there'll be the interruption of a 10 day family holiday...
Oh well, I keep reminding myself that I'm stronger and faster than my first try this time last year. Actually, that reminds me, this morning Timehop threw up that I'd posted 2 years ago about being really chuffed with myself for a walk. This was a few weeks after I couldn't face the pain of walking up the hill from the local shops because my joints were still suffering from pregnancy related issues, despite having had the baby a few months after. If you'd said to me 2 years ago that I'd be training for my second HM, I'd have assumed it was a complete joke! A bit of perspective can be a useful thing.
