I've spent the last week weighing up the relative benefits of Strava and Nike+ and, being fundamentally technologically illiterate, I have not been able to reach any kind of decision so I'm gonna use both (yeah, dumb, but forgive me my option paralysis, it's been a stressful few weeks). I've signed up to the July distance and climb challenges on Strava so if you are going to join me (please do!!) then if you join the distance challenge too I can see how many kilometers everyone has done in aggregate, which I hope should be fun! So far I have friends here in Singapore, in Oxford, in Germany, and even my lovely mum in Somerset pitching in, so it is a global effort!
I'm also going to wear a pedometer, more than anything really just to see whether I can hit a million steps in a month - kind of a scary prospect when you think how damn hard it is to hit even the 10k recommended daily target, let alone more than three times that target (*panics*).
The idea is going to be to run about 16km a day, probably to and from work, on weekdays, and longer distances at the weekend. I'm going to split those longer distances up into an early morning (7am-ish) and a late afternoon (5pm-ish) run on each day of the weekend, both around the 10km distance. I will post on my Facebook page (D4D: 500/31 - please like it!) every Friday where and when I will be starting each of those weekend runs, so anyone who wants to join me can come along. Hopefully this will also have the side benefit of forcing me out of bed on weekend mornings, which I anticipate will be problematic even in the absence of standard overenthusiastic Friday night wine consumption. Those who know me will be (in some cases painfully) aware that I am not a morning person. In fact, as my alarm went off today and it dawned on me that it will be 6am starts every single day for the next 31 days, I could have cried. I think in fact the early mornings are going to be more of a challenge than the distance!
That said, a lot of people have asked me how I have trained for this. My answer to them has always been "well, I only decided to do it last week, so I've not really had a chance to train, but it will be fine, I run a lot". It only very recently (i.e. yesterday) occurred to me that this is not actually currently true. It is not true at all. In fact, according to my running app, I ran 27.5km in the whole of June, and - gulp - 8.52km in May. So, this should be... um... interesting.
Bearing in mind my fundamental lack of preparedness I guess the best I can do for myself is an early bed, rather than spending five hours making an explorer costume for a six year old who will in no way appreciate it. Sadly that ship has already sailed, but at least before I set off tomorrow morning I will get to see Small Child in a pith helmet covered in butterflies, which should hopefully keep me giggling to at least the halfway point.
0 down, 500 to go...
No comments:
Post a Comment