The Road To Thetford - Day 38 - Facing The Truth

I was poorly/tired on Sunday which meant I barely did 3400 steps, missing out on a chance to do 100k steps in one week - I did about 92k which is still impressive given 80k of it was walking not running.

Last night I faced the cold hard numbers of the weighing scales which revealed what I had subsconciously suspected (but ignored), that the gains from running were being wiped out by overeating, particularly ice creams and crisps.

If I continue to remain overweight then I will continue to be subject to more tiredness and illness, and willpower by itself can only get you so far, hence the sporadic inconsistent nature of my running.  Also, the runs themselves have been slow and half-hearted.

With just a month to go until the Thetford Marathon, I am saying to myself "enough is enough" with the poor food choices - in my bullet journal, I will be adding an extra monitoring of good and bad food choices, as this will show clearly where I am making poor choices.

This morning I was up at 5.30am, and having done my meditation and affirmations, I did run as hard as I could, with the odd stop to give my lungs a chance to recover.

Sunrise.

Wickhampton Church.

Part of a rainbow in the distance.

The Road To Thetford - Day Two - Poppies

I did a two mile run this morning and the fields either side of the country road had plenty of poppies at the edges.

I have also worked out what distances I want to do for the next nine weekends in order to be ready for the marathon on the tenth weekend.

For this weekend it will be 4 miles on the Saturday and 6 miles on the Sunday.

The Road To Thetford! Day1

Given all these top athletes are on the Road to Rio, I thought I should have my Route to Thetford given that is my big race of this year.

After a number of months with only sporadic bouts of running, today with just 10 weeks to go until the Thetford Marathon (http://www.marafunevents.co.uk/) I started my training - ideally it should have been six weeks ago but life got complicated and it has taken until now to mentally break the feeling of being overwhelmed by it.

I have been inspired from reading a book called the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod (I got it out of the library but places like Amazon stock it as well), and I am using this as a starting basis to make the changes I need to make in my life.

I plan on using my Mike Reboot blog to report on whole aspect of applying the concepts from the Miracle Morning and on this blog report on the running aspect.

Tonight I will work out a manageable 10 week training plan to tie in with the Miracle Morning approach but as a starter I did about 1.5 miles this morning and I have been eating healthy today as well.

No photos today as I forgot to take the ipad with me on the run.

Only The Brave or in my case Only The Stupid

I work in a finance team who quite unusually are highly active in their personal lives, with a high proportion doing some form of regular running, football, squash or workout.
In December there was a bit of banter about doing an event a bit like Tough Mudder but more local and created to support the very worthwhile East Anglian Children's Hospices (EACH) - there was two options - 5miles and 15 obstacles or 10miles and 30 obstacles - and with lots of bravado, comments of "Blakey has 100km so 10miles is a walk in a park", and "I wouldn't get out of bed for less than 10miles" and so on, so we chose 10miles......

Well as you might gather from the limited number of posts in the last few months, I didn't do a great deal of training, running or strength related, so today I found myself using every bit of mental fortitude to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep clambering over obstacles, through very muddy tunnels, knee water and mud etc whereas my eight colleagues managed it with more ease having trained properly for it.....


Above is the pre-race photo - nice and clean with our Aviva t-shirts.


And here is the post-race photos.

It was very tough for me, some of which was of my own making, and some due to the nature of the course - the second half had few obstacles which meant you were running for longer.

I have decided that I whilst I should have trained for this, I am going to use to train from i.e. as a launchpad to regular running through spring and summer, especially as I have signed up to do the Thetford Marathon, which is off-road along an old 110 mile Roman route.

If you are interested about EACH, there website is  https://www.each.org.uk/.

We raised about £500 (it shows £350 but we have some cash donations to add) but if you wish to contribute, the link is https://www.justgiving.com/ClaimsFinance?utm_source=facebook