The plan for January has me doing some intervals on Mondays. This all sounds fine in practice, but after my first day back working through the build-up of emails and issues over Christmas, I was knackered by 7pm – before I’d even got out to run.

At lunchtime, I’d pottered out for a walk down to the new roundabout at the other end of the “long mile”, just by the new Booths development. It takes about 15 minutes each way, so fits in nicely for a 30 minute walk. Once that shop is open, I’ll probably be carrying bags of fresh orange juice and other tasty foodstuffs on my way back. Fitting strength training in with a walk – this is all good.

The children had their first day on packed lunches, as mentioned yesterday. I’m not wholly comfortable yet with the selection of food that I’m putting in the lunchboxes. They had a wrap, orange, kit kat and some dried fruit bits which got a thumbs-up when I picked them up this afternoon. When I proposed that I should cook them some couscous and other lunchtime treats, I was greeted with howls and demands for “a normal” packed lunch. So far, I’ve got them to agree that some tasty cheeses and flatbreads would be acceptable, but I think we can do better than that.

Getting back to the running. After dinner, I was super-tired and ended up snoozing on the sofa. About an hour and a half later, I woke realising that I needed to get out and that it was nearly half past 8. I rubbed my eyes, got changed and headed out.

The plan was intervals, and so I used the long mile again to measure against the evenly positioned lamp posts. The posts are about 50-ish meters apart and so I slowly ran two and then tried going faster for the next two, alternating for a couple of iterations. I was soon worn out and so continued for the rest of the session with three lamp posts at a slow pace and two at a faster pace.

It seemed to go well. Runkeeper said that I touched 3:40 min/km at one point – that’s at a point, not sustained, but it means that I can propel myself at a reasonable pace sometimes. At that moment, I felt like I was going for it, but I doubt that I could maintain such a pace for anything more than a nanosecond at the moment!

So two km at an average of 6:08 min/km. I’ve done better before now, but not in any systematic way. The plan for next Monday is to do the whole thing again and try to have more iterations with faster intervals and perhaps go a bit further down the road.

For now, I’m just happy that I got my evening run complete and stuck to the training plan – without having slept through.