Hello, world!

Oh hi there. I’m not sure if we’ve met. TBH, I’m something of a blogaholic, so maybe we have. After several years of writing on various topics including triathlon, food, and adventuring, it feels like high time I consolidated. Well, mostly. Two of the above three may yet live to fight another day 🙂

The Husb and I recently returned from a grown up gap year (aka mid-life crisis) which involved cycling 14000km around various parts of our wonderful world. Read all about it via above link. While that was all well and good (ok ok, flipping amazing) I am a runner at heart. So the current adventure is getting from zero to Grizzly (20 miles of muddy hills, read all about it here) in the princely sum of 4 months.

You see, dear reader, I know myself all too well. If I chose a goal involving nice flat tarmac, I would be liable to battering myself towards speediness, no doubt resulting in injury. After 18 months of almost zero running, aiming for a flat 10K would actually be far worse for me than a hilly 20-miler! The Grizzly is probably the most talked about race in our area; the iconic event that everyone’s done or wants to do. I have done it before, but it was a bit of a disaster, so there’s certainly unfinished business to be settled!

Working back from the goal distance, and allowing myself a mileage increase of just 10% per week (based on something some sensible coach once said), I reckoned I could just about do it. Provided I was really sensible, and only aimed to ‘get round’, i.e. with lots of walking. Provided I listened to my body and did all the sensible things like fuelling properly and foam-rolling religiously. Provided I did not try to do a million other things in parallel. Honestly, who is this sensible person? I hardly recognise her.

I’ve run 3(ish) times a week for the last 10 weeks. This week I’ve run over 20 miles, which feels like a satisfying (if arbitrary) milestone. I also did my first long run on proper ‘Grizzly’ terrain, which meant lots of hills and mud along the South-West coast path. And I almost enjoyed it.

While I haven’t found any cake on my runs (disappointing to say the least), I did make this rather fine coffee and walnut extravaganza for my friend’s birthday.

More soon. Not always about running either 🙂

Note for blog nerds: for the entirety of my blogging ‘career’, I have been cursing the wordpress editor for, quite frankly, making my life unreasonably difficult. This is my first ever post using the ‘iA Writer’ app to draft the post in markdown, and then share to a wordpress draft. Let’s just say that my blood pressure has remained normal, for the first time ever ;). Please do say if you’d like more info, as it’s literally taken me five years to find a decent solution.