Today was another opportunity to combine Juneathon and #30dayswild. Every first Wednesday is Toddle Together at one of our local nature reserves. We went to one in February when Mini-Ginge had just started walking, unreliable and on his own terms. 

It was a bit of a disaster as he didn’t want to walk, go in his pram or be carried in his pouch, he howled for most of the time (very out of character) and I felt that he was woefully underdressed compared to other children (bad mum). On the plus side, the walk was led by a lovely chap called Jim who I actually knew from my rugby watching days and hadn’t seen for about 15 years. And we had a nice lunch. 
  
In better weather and with an enthusiastically walking boy, I had better hopes for today. It wasn’t a brisk walk, Mini-Ginge loves stones and cannot walk on a gravelly path without stopping every few feet to pick some up and redistribute them. The upside of this is that I got a good upper body workout from scooping him up and carrying him at times so that we could get further than the visitors centre.  

Apart from the stones, grass and a dandelion head, Mini-Ginge particularly liked a bus that was in the car park. I think I need to re-emphasise the nature part of the plan to him at some point. 
 

In other news, I discovered that the token yoga that I did on day one had actually worked some long neglected tummy muscles and I have spent all day wincing whenever I laughed. 

Well yesterday’s cloud lifted a little bit by this morning and seemed to have shifted entirely by home time. Hurrah!

This did not stop me procrastinating about my run, though to be honest not much stops me from procrastinating about my run. I know the above/below the neck rule about running with a cold, but I feel absolutely fine apart from a slightly rattly chest and a bit of a cough.

The plan was do do a run-walk for 20 minutes, taking in the local nature reserve for #30dayswild. I felt ok running and stuck to the slightly wilder paths instead of taking my usual route around the lake. The sun was trying to shine, the gale force winds had settled down and the birds were singing. I stopped to take photos, tried my best to run up the hills, walked up some of them and rattled a bit.

By the time I was nearly home, I’d done two and a bit miles. I could have stopped. But then I started thinking… If I stop now, I’ll write this off as being two miles where I walked – it’s not a proper run. But…If I carry on for three miles, it will counts towards my proper marathon training. So I plodded on. And so   three miles it was.

Since I got a bit more of my bounce back, I have been excited about Juneathon. I wasn’t planning to run everyday, but thought that the threat of “I don’t want to, but I will because it’s Juneathon” might kick start my slightly wobbly alleged-marathon training. 

I was so excited, I also signed up for The Wildlife Trusts’ 30 Days Wild campaign. At 35, I was proper chuffed to get a WALLCHART (my phone actually autocaps that word because of my initial giddiness about it), some stickers and a badge. 

And then the day before June came, my rediscovered bounce disappeared into the sunset like a moody space hopper. I’m not too sure what happened to it, let’s call it a combination of self-doubt, tiredness and maternal guilt. Whatever it was, it left me with a deep feeling of meh towards most things, including all of these 30 day challenges I was supposed to be doing. 
The restorative post-work nap that I decided to sneak in turned into a deep two hour sleep and when I woke up, the wind was howling and the rain was pouring down. I haven’t run for a week because Mini-Ginge (who is basically a boy-shaped petridish of germs) had kindly shared his most recent cold with me and this has left me with a rattling cough that doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere. I might be making excuses, but it seemed like a daft idea to take my still not quite right chest out in the cold and wet. 

I really couldn’t be bothered. 

But I know that this lull won’t last a month, I want to shift it as soon as I can. And I knew that if I failed on day one, I would resent everyone else’s efforts and would feel twice as bad about myself. 

So I unrolled my yoga mat on the kitchen floor and in the ambient lighting of the cooker hood, I did a bit of a warm up, some sun salutations (the first time that I have ever remembered the sequence properly) and a quick relaxation listening to the rain coming down. 

Hopefully these will help bring some metaphorical and actual sunshine in the next few days.