One from my list

In keeping with this blog's original objective of chronicling my progress through the morass of retired life, I can now make an interim report on one of the things I claimed as an objective "when I retired".

I said I would get fitter.

A couple of years ago I started walking up the hill outside our house in the evenings after work. It's a little used lane for the most part, which goes past a few houses and then on into woods and countryside.  It's only 880m (according to Google Maps) but it is quite an effective hill, with some seriously steep bits.  Anyway, I took to  walking up it, attempting, where I could, to keep pace with some bangin' psytrance at about 120-140bpm (which is much too fast to walk normally, so I looked like a loony when this was successful).  The idea of this was to protect my knees, those being famously weedy and unable to handle anything more percussive than walking.

This carried on for a while and I gradually got faster (I think my PB was a whisker over 25min), even sometimes trotting a bit on the way down, until winter came, and the unlit lane became unappealing, at which point I gave up.  So that was that.

Anyway, couple of weeks ago I though it was time to take up the challenge again.  My first effort was a shade under 30min, which I was fairly happy with. I've been getting faster - and trotting more - doing the course nearly every day since.  And today I did yet another PB (a remarkable 23:05) by running all the way.

It's hard to express how surprised I am to be able to do this!  I can't remember when I could last run for 20 minutes continuously, but it was a LONG time ago. I suppose that my previous sedentary (working) lifestyle was very bad for my knees, and that my current regime of sleeping, wandering aimlessly about quite a lot, doing some hard labour on the house of luuurve from time to time, and occasionally listening to bangin' psytrance, has built up their musculature.  Or something.  Anyway, it's a really big milestone for me, and I feel great.

To celebrate, I drank beer.  Cheers!