On and up

So far, so good.  On Saturday I ran the Eastleigh parkrun and clocked in at 20:23, compared to my effort 2 weeks earlier of 21:40.  My intention had been to go 30 seconds faster, but I overshot a bit.

I'm making a strong effort to keep the tricky balance between working the Achilles tendon (good) and stressing it (bad).  I've been running more days than not since Christmas, and broadly I'm feeling fine.  I may get the odd twinge but it's coping pretty well with steadily increasing demands.

In 2 weeks I'm doing my first competitive event for ages - the Southampton 5k Glow in the Park event.  Greatly looking forward to it, but must, must be sensible.  Quite a strange feeling, focussing on keeping my time high... I should probably aim to do it in 20 minutes, a nice round 4 minute k pace.

What I did notice on Saturday was that although my legs were fine, my lungs found the course surprisingly hard work.  Apart from the odd hill when cycling, I haven't really worked at full lung capacity for ages, and this is going to need some work.

Run in the new!

2014 was, let's face it, a bit of a fallow year, what with the FOOSH in January and the achilles tendonitis which has been a blocker ever since May.  But Mrs S and I have been running almost every day over the Christmas hols and yesterday I did a 5-mile loop, very sensibly and gently.  Fantastic!

So 2015 is going to be the year of getting back into competitive running.  Let's take a look at the goals I set this time last year:

• Top 10 position in this winter's XC league
• Top 40 place in the Grizzly
• Top 20 in the RR10
• Top 3 in Clarendon marathon
• Southampton parkrun sub 18:00
• Eastleigh parkrun sub 18:35
• 10 miles in under 60 minutes

Cancel the top 2, as I'm not doing the XC league or the Grizzly this year... but the others all represent unfinished business and I'm going to be attacking them all with vim and vigour.