January has been the month for challenges. A challenge to get back into training after Christmas. A challenge of 100, 10k or great runs in one year, a challenge of 10,000 steps per day and the challenge of my first Ultra. January has been very busy indeed.
At the start of the year I began recording a few minutes each day of my training and how it has been going. It has been interesting to look back upon them and I want to continue doing for the rest of the year. I am finding some nights more time consuming than others, particularly when Little Man won't go to sleep before 1am so struggle to upload the videos. I am trying to upload as regularly as possible, if you want to subscribe to my YouTube channel you will get a notification when I do upload so you can watch the latest training instalments!
Training has been going well for the most part. I love having a plan to follow as it helps to keep me focused but I will admit to missing the bling. I think I have had withdrawal symptoms this month! The only race I have done is the Ultra, but then you could say the month has been building up to that.
Mid way through the month I went to the National Running show and had a fantastic day out with my eldest daughter. We won a t shirt, a pair of trainers and even had my 3D gait analysis done which was really interesting.
I had gone to the show with no expectations and simply wanted to have a day out with my daughter. As such I think we really enjoyed it. Had we gone specifically to purchase running items I think we would have left a little disappointed. There seemed to be a lot of stands for races and virtual races but not many other stands around. There were the odd few but it seemed to be missing big brands particularly in technology like Garmin, TomTom and Fitbit. Given it was the first year though my daughter and I still had a really good time walking round and chatting to various people. We would certainly go again.
I have joined a challenge to complete 100 runs of a 10km or greater distance in 2018. So far I have completed 15 runs which have been 10km or greater. This nicely tied in with my 10,000 steps a day challenge. I had originally wanted to run 10km every day in January but this would have been too time consuming, so instead wanted to aim for every other day. Given I achieved 15 I think I was pretty close. In addition to running I also completed 10,000 steps a day in January for Teenage Cancer trust and their party hard, train harder campaign.
January was also the month which saw me complete my first time as Run Director at parkrun. It was made even better by the support of my running club who attended in full force. I then had the amazing surprise of reaching target for Meningitis Research Foundation and my Virgin London Marathon place. January started awesome and finished with an ultra. A pretty amazing month
