Some background

(and there will be much more background to come)

It was two years ago when I decided I might actually enjoy running.  Up until then it had always been something I would do as part of a charity event, usually hauling myself and my partner around a 10k in a little over 70 minutes with walking and jogging tending to feature equally during the second half, or as the warm up for a gym class.

It was the latter that caught my imagination.  I'd been getting to the gym a little while before classes for some time, warming up on the treadmill, but I had apparently fallen into the habit of running 5k.  Despite it being there on the panel in front of me, I wasn't particularly good at pacing and so I'd often need to take a walking break before finishing.  Through December 2010 I managed to take that 5k time on the treadmill from just over 30 minutes to just over 26 minutes.  Times were not consistent and it was lucky that I recovered quickly from these efforts or the gym classes would have been even more compromised by my turning up as a sweaty mess.

Going into 2011 I started running a little outside.  I took part in a three race series of multi-terrain 10k runs, covering the first half with my partner before kicking out during the second half, improving my pacing each time so that recovery breaks stopped featuring and managing to break the hour during the second run of the series.  From here, new targets appeared, a sub-25 minute 5k (achieved with the help of Milton Keynes parkrun), a sub-55 minute 10k (achieved during an undulating race from one of the local villages), and so the first half of 2011 continued.  Progress with moderate training and very little structure.  During the second half of the year I signed up for a few half marathons and although never in any danger of not finishing them, never quite achieved the sort of times I would have liked, and worse still, no particular improvement as time passed.

And so 2011 finished with more than a dozen 5k races, the same for 10k races and a half-dozen or so half marathons.  Outside of those events, training was, well unstructured would be a polite way to describe.

A beginning

And so the first post.

It may not be an obvious stage to start a blog; it isn't as if I have just started to run.  The last two years have contained varying volumes of running with various amounts of effort.  I'll elaborate on where I am, how I got here and where I am heading, at least at the moment, during the next few weeks