This week has been a great one for pushing distances and endurance but I have learnt something too, namely that the long weekend run is not going to be realistic. I have missed it three weeks in a row now, simply because I am exhausted on Sundays. It is sensible to learn from this and adapt rather than force a routine that isn’t going to be optimal. Add to that the fact that the weather is warming now (today was six degrees) and I will now be able to cycle to university and back on Mondays and it is clear that I HAVE to rest on Sundays. That means that I am only going to be running twice weekly, swimming thrice weekly and cycling long distance once. So, as a result I now have the opportunity to stretch the distances on my runs, safe in the knowledge that I don’t have to hammer through one at the weekend. This appears to be the routine I have fallen into naturally, and right now my swimming is in the ascendancy so it seems logical to follow the path of least resistance to fitness and health.

Another thing that is becoming prohibitive is that living in a small town is making it increasingly difficult to devise longer courses on which to run. I am going to have to utilise my ingenuity here because I really don’t want to start doing laps of the same course. That fills me with the dread of tedium. I used to run laps around a local waterway but I could only ever achieve four, some 7 miles or so because it simply bored the bejesus out of me. Running long distance has cured that and I really don’t want to go back.

All in all it has been a very productive week. I am only a fortnight back into my swimming routine and I am hitting 3000 metres regularly, which is not far from Iron Man distance swimming, albeit drills and lap swimming for now, rather than open water. I am seriously considering shooting for an Iron Man triathlon. I had in mind to do it a few years ago during my degree studies but I was unlucky enough to be in three car accidents in two years and that was that. Right now I am quietly homing in on the possibility, but I doubt it will come this year. My target for 2016 is to shed my excess body weight. As an adult I have suffered an illness that required me to take medication that caused weight gain. I am now off it and I am determined to get my body back. It is something that is so frustrating to me because I wish that, if I was going to be overweight then I would at least have enjoyed the excess. To be betrayed by fate like that seem so unfair. I got the consequences without the fun bit of the deal.

No more. This is the year I return to the state in which I entered the world, and I am getting closer and closer. I calculate that I have around a stone to go to get back to single digit body fat percentages.