My last blog post was right at the end of August, which is a good indication of how I have been neglecting this recently. So what’s going on?

While I have been keeping up the training pretty well (including weekly speed training and the ongoing football refereeing season), my discipline has not been so great in terms of diet.

I’ll do the usual official weigh-in tomorrow, but I’m hovering just under 80 kg at the moment. That’s a gain of 2 kg since August. OK, hardly horrific (given I’m still very much lower than my starting weight…) but the whole idea is to get down to 75 kg to support my goals!

What else has been happening?

I’ve now done my Leadership in Running Fitness (LIRF) course via England Athletics. I’m pending the formal qualification coming through now, and am looking forward to helping out with my local running club. This will mainly be track speed sessions. It’s been a really interesting course to do, especially the parts on structuring sessions in the right way.

After quite a few years, I’ve upgraded my running watch to the Fenix 6. I’m very happy with it so far. It’s helped shine a bit of a light on my training generally being too high-intensity focused – i.e. not enough easy runs or equivalent exercise. Ideally, this should be better balanced. More on that to come!

Finally, I joined a gym. This is really to support the last point and give myself options for easier forms of exercise when in recovery. For example: Stationary bike or cross-trainer. I should really factor in some weight training as well — when I’ve had a full-on induction I’ll post more on this topic!

In conclusion, I’ve slipped a bit, but overall the improvements are still there. I’m lower than my starting weight. My 5k times are still good. However, both of these would have been even better had I remained disciplined throughout.

I’ll keep going!