Still here?

I'm glad to report that exercise has proven to be an easier habit to get back into than Blogging.

Since my last post in January, I've been cycling fairly regularly - 2 to 3 days per week, at least up until the last few weeks.

A combination of rain, cold and rediscovering another form of exercise have been the reasons that the cycling has dropped off a bit lately.

Actually, the rain isn't too bad, and I have some winter gear to protect against the cold, so I can happily focus the story on the 'new' exercise.

The excitement surrounding City to Surf starts about this time of year and I figured I'd give it a go again. So recognising how precious my sleep is in the mornings, I realised I'd struggle to run before coming to work. I briefly considered running to work, but at 15km -it's just a bit out of my range!

So, the solution... run at lunchtimes!

I thought I'd better test my running legs closer to home first, so I headed out for a 5k run a couple of Sundays back.

What a disaster! It felt like my quads were being hammered (literally) with every step. I think I only ran for about 2k in total and walked the rest of the 5k route. I thought (hoped) it was just that I don't stretch very much, so I spent the next few days stretching at every opportunity.

I then tried the lunchtime run with a colleague - and thankfully managed a bit over 5k in a bit over 30 minutes. No pain. A great route - fairly flat and next to the water.

Now I've done 5 of those sessions in the last couple of weeks, with a 7k run at the weekend. So I'm hoping to build up from there. There's a couple of colleagues who make up the lunchtime training group, so that helps us all to stick at it.

I'm not prepared to commit to any target time just yet for C2S this year. But we'll see how the training goes...