Tag: garmin

Day 6/30 – Tormented by canal desires

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First of all, an apology. I was absolutely knackered yesterday and actually fell asleep, laptop on knee, whilst writing up my Juneathon efforts. There was a much better entry planned in my head as I ran, one that was full of witty bon mots and insightful comment. What you ended up with was something barely literate and lightly dribbled on. After that, I crashed out for an hour before heading out for a lovely afternoon/evening with big sis and my adorable niece.

There was no way on this earth that I was going to get up for an early run. No alarm was set and yet I still woke up at bang on 5.45. Thanks Juneathon. Needless to say, I looked at the time, muttered darkly and fell back asleep. A bit unfortunate because a morning run should have been a given today as it’s my mate’s birthday and we were off sailing the dark and choppy waters of the Leeds-Liverpool canal.

I reckon that everyone should have a go on a canal barge at some point in their lives, it’s ace! It’s brilliant seeing things from a different perspective and at a different pace, even if it’s somewhere that you know quite well. The route that we chose took us down to where I tend to do my canal runs and the outward journey was pretty much a repeat of one of my most regretted and hellish runs ever. It was far nicer on a boat.

Where I start my canal runs, viewed from a barge

It’s definitely left me with a taste for a towpath run along a different section of canal. The downside of this is that I’ll have to park up at the ice cream parlour that we went to yesterday (and might well have accidentally called in at again today…) and resist the lure of a single scoop with sprinkles.

Oh yes, today’s exercise. I’m not sure what was the most amazing part of today – the fact that I stayed sober or the fact that I went for a run at the end of all this. Only 2.5 mile s (which was all that I wanted to do after my narcoleptic antics yesterday) and at a deliberately slow pace. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I want to start getting my distance up a bit, I need to keep an eye on my pace and this seemed an ideal opportunity to get used to using the nagging garmin to watch what I was doing. When I uploaded my stats, it was interesting (to me anyway) to see that my deliberately slower pace was the same as my average for yesterday when I was set off nicely then ground to a halt. I think that this should teach me something.

And the experiement proved…

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That my hypothesis was correct – ran 3 miles before yoga, tom yum soup for tea and then yoga-ed. And managed to stay conscious for the entire relaxation at the end, no snoring, no drifting, no suddenly realising that I’ve not heard a word that the teacher has said since “lie down on your mats”. It was rather splendid.

In fact, I’ve come out of the class feeling completely blissful and chilled out. I feel like I’m smiling from inside for the first time in ages. It’s a wonderful feeling and having it has made me realise how long it is since I’ve felt like that.

The way our yoga class runs is that it’s an 8 week progressive course, but the courses run continuously so a new course starts every 8 weeks or so. New people join, old people drop out, old hands guard their mat territory like feral beasts (that’s just me then?) and we go back to basics again. I think this does us all good; I know that I pick up bad habits and it’s easy to slide into casually skipping through postures without thinking deeply about what you’re doing. This probably applies to more than just yoga and it’s maybe something I need to do a bit more through life in general. Maybe it’s something we all need to do.

In other news, I’ve finally discovered Garmin Connect. Whatever your feelings on Garmins, this appeals to my inner geek and makes far prettier graphs and maps than the training centre. I may even get brave and bore people with my (quite frankly embarassing) run stats, particularly since I’ve realised that I’m very coy about admitting what speed I go at (hint, it rhymes with ‘glow’. Very glow).

In wool news, I went to Whitby and sold a kidney to buy vast amounts of lovely but pricey yarn. So I now have 3 pending projects from the new wool pile, 1 planned from previous escapades, 3 half formed ideas, 1 half baked idea (thanks to a link on Beanz’s blog I now have a pattern for knitted cupcakes. It scares me how much this excites me) and lots of stray balls with no future plans. I must stop buying new wool.