Silence has again ruled, hasn’t it?
Considering that we are ‘stay at home slackers’, the last couple of weeks or so have been extraordinarily busy. Things are looking almost as busy going forward.
As a result, my walking mileage (and therefore my fitness) has suffered. It’s the 18th of the month, and thus far I have only walked 75 miles. Absolutely none of it was novel (although talking of novels, I did finally make it through the audio-book of Wolf Hall – my goodness, that was hard work!).
I still hope to break through 1800 miles for the year-to-date by the end of the month.
Mick’s running has not suffered so much (running, by its nature, being a less time consuming endeavour than walking). It was a 20-miler for him on Monday (I met him twice with fresh water bottles and jelly babies, and he was looking good at both points). His marathon is only a couple of weeks away, so his mileages are easing off now.
Other hot news is that Fitness Footwear gave us each a pair of shoes. Mine, which have proved to be incredibly comfortable, have barely been off my feet since they arrived. Mick’s are proving to be a good talking point (with opinions ranging from ‘hideous!’ to ‘cool!’). I will write more about mine soonest.
That photo has absolutely nothing to do with this post. I just picked a photo at random from our K2CW walk to make the post a tiny smidge more colourful.
Although all has been quiet around here, I have been getting out and about.
Well, ‘out’, at least.
Since my last posting all of my walks have been from the front door and I’m afraid that there were only so many times I could write about the same routes, and I exceeded that number long ago.
Not that it’s all been uninteresting. With the killer horses being grazed elsewhere this year, one of my abandoned routes (9 or 11 miles, depending what I do when I get to the canal) has become doable again. I do have to trespass to avoid one overgrown bit, have to battle with a field cropped to its boundary and I have been chased by a tribe of completely fearless bullocks every time (so fearless that once I get over the stile I can pat those at the front of the herd on the nose without them flinching), but otherwise I’m happy to have become reacquainted with that route.
I’ve also been beating speed records. Probably a simple case of boredom with the same routes. My record has been averaging 4.25mph over a 7 mile route. It’s not big or clever, but in the absence of hills, I guess that it’s keeping a small amount of fitness intact – which is the main aim of the outings.
Even with a bit of a drop-off in July, the year so far looks like this from a monthly mileage point of view:
All being well (touching wood, praying to the God of Uninjuriedness and all that), by the end of August I should have exceeded my previous highest calendar-year mileage.
At some point, I may even do something worthy of writing about.
Fearless bullocks
I didn’t mention the ‘field of thistles’ did I? I have now found the least prickly route through, but it still involves five minutes of dense thistles.
