My last post was about how I was going to train for the Cardiff half marathon which took place last October… er… so, there has been quite some time since I showed my face around here.

The half marathon didn’t happen. I’d injured myself a few weeks into training and after taking a week, and then a second week, and then a third week off – the motivation to keep on for the training just wasn’t there. Although I kept going with the exercise.

With the training I’d started to lose weight and when I stopped with the sore leg, I’d started going to the gym and found that I was still losing weight with the strength training. So I stuck to the work in the gym and happily I ended up losing three stone between the summer and before Christmas. So I had gone a long way towards my 2013 new year resolutions without actually running.

We still went to Cardiff for the weekend of the half marathon and instead walked around half of the route and enjoyed watching the race on the Sunday – but there was no way that we could have completed the run on the day.

I’ll go through the strength training in a post on another day, but with the start of 2015 approaching, I thought that it would be a good time to pick up the running again and so I signed up for Janathon for a second year. Today’s run being the first run of the month.

Jude and I have been staying with Lorna and Matthias, our friends in Aylesbury, and so Matthias and I went to the parkrun this morning – a pleasant, level 5k run at the other side of town. This was the first proper 5k that I’d run for a couple of months, and so I was very pleased indeed to come in at 29 minutes 41 seconds. This was about 4 minutes quicker than I’d done at Aylesbury a few months ago, which I put down to the weight loss and the strength training.

I’ll write more over the next few weeks as I’m supposed to run and write each day. The plan is to run every day, even if it is sometimes running one or two km on the treadmill as a warm-up at the gym. Tomorrow I’ll try to write what the plan for the rest of the month is. But today, I’m just glad to have got up for 9am, run the 5k and got a reasonable time (for me!)