The day after Blackpool usually involves a precautionary day off for recovery purposes. Unfortunately, due to a slight breakdown in communications only one of us remembered having the conversation about taking the day off and so I had the day to myself…

After talking to one of my colleagues about her lazy day off last week, I decided to declare today to be a pyjama day. I never spend the day in my pyjamas, so this had a vast amount of novelty value. Annoyingly I had to go to Tesco, town and do some kind of Janathoning before indulging. For the sake of my fellow shoppers (and it was cold out) I conceded that a proper waistband was in order, resulting in a bit of shimmying out of my jeans in the pub car park (I was wearing them over my tights, I’m not that shameless just yet) when I landed at the canal.

To give my legs a bit of a rest, I decided to run in the flat, lock-free direction which was fine until around the mile mark where the towpath was still encased in hard, uneven, slippery snow and ice. I persevered for a bit until I realised that there was no point in torturing myself when I could just turn around and run the splashy, muddy way that I had just come from. So I turned round and extended my loop to take it up to three miles.

Typically, it was only when I was walking back to my start point that I lost my footing and nearly pitched head-first into the icy depths…

The afternoon was spent pyjama-clad, drinking tea and indulging in several episodes of David Tennant-era Dr Who. I want to spend the rest of the week doing this.