Thursday photo #334

Things seem to have settled down a bit here this week. We’ve relaxed into our routine and things are starting to seem normal. Masks are a part of everyday life, even for the children. Personally, I’m filling my time while they are at school although not in the way I thought I would. Work is very all or nothing and sometimes, there’s not as much work available as I would like. It has given me a chance to do plenty of running and swimming and catch up with friends. Now though, I do probably need to start looking around for extra work. Much as I’d rather ride the wave of doing not a lot.

1000 miles

Towards the end of last year, I decided to start running every day. I know it’s not for everyone and the majority of people feel there should be a rest day at least once a week. For me though, it has worked brilliantly. I am terrible at staying motivated. Running every day makes it a habit and takes the motivation out of it.

What I hadn’t realised when I started to run every day is how many miles I would cover. I thought I’d probably run at least a mile a day, maybe two. Sometimes I’d need to do a long run, particularly because when I started I was marathon training. I considered signing up to the 1000 mile challenge for 2020 as well. The aim of that is to run 1000 miles during the course of the year. I spoke to a couple of people who had done it and they warned me how hard it was. It seemed like an unnecessary added pressure in addition to running the marathon, so I didn’t sign up.

As it happened, the marathon was cancelled. I kept running every day and clocking up the miles. I soon realised I would be on target to run 1000 miles in 2020. In fact, I thought I could finish it by the end of October as I was averaging over 100 miles per month. Then my marathon was cancelled so my miles went down. But not as much as I thought they would. I made a new goal of running 100 miles every month. I soon realised I could get to 1000 miles by the end of September. I’m quite glad I didn’t sign up to do it officially because I didn’t need the extra pressure. But doing 1000 miles in 9 months does feel like an achievement.

Scooting around

Both of my girls learned to ride a bike when they were three. It made life a lot easier because if we wanted to walk somewhere, they could ride their bikes instead and the complaining reduced notably. The only drawback with cycling so early was that they never really got into using scooters. They’ve both had a two wheeled scooter for 18 months now, but rarely use them. Recently though, we got Lia a new scooter because her previous one was a bit rickety.

Since Lia’s new scooter arrived, the girls have got quite into going to the skate park to use their scooters. They’re starting to get used to using the ramps and trying to build up some speed. I don’t think the scooters will ever replace bikes, they’re not great at going from A to B on them. But it’s nice to have an extra way of getting some exercise that they really seem to enjoy.

Thursday photo #334

The girls have both recently moved up a ballet class. They loved putting on their new uniforms to pose for a photo.