Posts

Posted Jan 7, 2015

Crazy busy here, working in Gloucester until Wednesday evening. A gym at the hotel, luckily! Just about managed:

Posted Jan 5, 2015

Posted Jan 5, 2015

Sunday, the day before a week of work and school: family time. A friend had suggested a group walk in the morning, and we thought it might be fun to walk from the field below Shardeloes House up to the Red Lion in Little Missenden, and back. There were 9 of us in total, and we had a very good stroll through the fields in that direction.

Posted Jan 3, 2015

If you've got kids, and it's the weekend, then your day's going to be pretty busy, right? Do I get a "yes brother"? Today was one of those days.

Posted Jan 2, 2015

I had planned for today to be an "exercise sandwich".

Posted Jan 1, 2015

Hello, fellow Janathoners, and welcome to 2015. May it be a great year for all of you!

Posted Sep 5, 2014

I love a good torch! Always have, and probably always will. So when I first came across a particular type of small, bright, zoomable and extremely cheap LED torch on Amazon, I was very interested. They use a particular LED called a Cree Q5, which appears to be widely known, and are available from a number of different vendors, the cheapest of which ship the item directly from China.

Posted Jun 29, 2014

I had two main ideas in mind when planning today's Juneathon activity. First, I've been absolutely dying to have a proper test run for the new Vibram Spyridons I bought about a week ago from Ten Point in Chesham Bois. (I really love my old Vibrams, but they are more aimed at road running with barely any tread and very thin soles through which you can feel every stone.) Secondly, I've been reading Alastair Humphrey's book "Microadventures: Local Discoveries for Great Escapes"...

Posted Jun 28, 2014

Jog, log and blog. Well, I've mostly managed two of these, at least... I'm rather behind on the blogging, though, as basically I've been really busy with loads of other things, especially at work. All part of the rich tapestry of life though, so I'm not complaining!

Posted Jun 18, 2014

Rest days are on my mind. I noticed chat about this in some of the other Juneathon blogs I follow, and feel similarly, that it is important to incorporate some level of rest into the week. So I had a very pleasant stroll round the canals of Rickmansworth over lunch, getting quite a few miles under my belt in the process.

Posted Jun 18, 2014

Work has been a bit manic, so I'm doing a short and sharp catch-up of the last two days. My Juneathon activities for Monday were:

Posted Jun 16, 2014

A pretty quiet day today. We had a family trip to near Cambridge, so there was limited scope for activity. The main feature was therefore about 30 minutes of yoga, trying out part of a class prepared by Mrs H with her YogaByEllie hat on for someone this week.

Posted Jun 15, 2014

What a lovely day! Our local exercise group had fielded a team of 7 to have a go at Wolf Run. In case you haven't come across this before, it is a 10k challenge which entails crossing various kinds of obstacles and traversing lots of muddy terrain. There are an increasing number of these events, such as Tough Mudder, the Chiltern Warrior and so on, if you are so inclined!

Posted Jun 15, 2014

Another busy day at work, so thank goodness for my regular Friday morning pairs PT session with Holger. Knowing that I had Wolf Run tomorrow, I asked that we didn't do anything that would scupper me too badly. Somehow, therefore, we ended up doing Tabata battle ropes, Bulgarian bags, burpee variations and other hideous exercises. Then we moved on to some weight work. I'm not sure Darrell knows how to not push it..! Really enjoyed it, though.

Posted Jun 13, 2014

A long one! I spent most of the day on a train going to or returning from Huddersfield, making some proper exercise difficult. However, I did manage to get some decent walking in, going by foot from Euston to Marylebone when getting home. The lovely weather helped!

Posted Jun 11, 2014

Wednesday is piano day for my two older kids. For various reasons, today was a long session: 45 minutes each, giving me 90 MINUTES FOR A RUN! Sweet.

Posted Jun 11, 2014

With some good weather forecast and uncertainty about what would be going on later, taking my running kit into work felt like a no-brainer. And so it was that I headed out for a 3.7 mile run around the aquadrome at Rickmansworth in the sun. There isn't a huge amount to say about it, apart from the fact that the canal and surrounding area was humming with activity and it was a lot of fun!

Posted Jun 9, 2014

Well, that was fun! I just had a trip into Town to meet up with an old friend from university. We had been trying to organise such a gathering for absolutely ages, but I'm always hard to pin down because of everything going on with the kids, orchestra etc, and he works in TV so finds himself disappearing for months at a time for filming. However, today we were both around!

Posted Jun 8, 2014

That was much more fun! Mrs H is now back, sighs of relief all round and Juneathon activities can resume. We had a pretty active day even before she returned, though, what with straightening out the house, doing some shopping etc.

Posted Jun 8, 2014

With the best will in the world, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to be able to manage for Saturday. Picture the scene: me, home alone with three kids; various kid events in the diary requiring taxi-ing, and no adults anywhere near. I had a vague hope that a teenager might be able to babysit for a short while, but this didn't turn out to be possible. However, events overtook me as it quickly became clear that things were not going to go to plan...

Posted Jun 6, 2014

Friday, aka manic day, how glad am I that you are nearly complete. Fridays in this household are usually filled up at both ends with good things: in the morning, I usually have my pairs PT session, while our youngest has "parents come in for some reading" sessions; Mrs H teaches yoga after drop-off too; then the evenings tend to involve swimming, Guides and Scouts. Today has confirmed how difficult it is to juggle everything with only one adult around! Without the help of kind friends, covering all the activities would have been impossible.

Posted Jun 5, 2014

If you'd asked me an hour ago how today went, I'd be sounding pretty up-beat. Yes, the working day was mostly topped and tailed by school drop-off/pick-up, followed by some extensive juggling to make it to an early evening meeting at school to do with going up to senior school. But, after that, I had the chance to head out for a run round Amersham, and I took full advantage of it!

Posted Jun 4, 2014

Mice weren't to blame, but things didn't quite go as expected today.

Posted Jun 3, 2014

(Edit: argh! It was just pointed out that I had called this post a Janathon one! Fixed...)

Posted Jun 2, 2014

There is no way that I'm going to be able to run every day during Juneathon, even though I would have loved to. If nothing else, the next few days will be tricky, as unfortunately Mrs H is away for the rest of the week, and child-related activity and work aren't going to give me much leeway during this time. However, I usually find that constraints can be a trigger for creativity, so will be using this approach to keep active.

Posted Jun 1, 2014

How time flies! June caught me unawares, and so it was this morning that I saw I had a decision to take: Juneathon or not? But you know the answer already!

Posted Jan 31, 2014

Today's effort comprises:

Posted Jan 31, 2014

Right, that didn't quite go to plan. I had been down for Wild Training, but circumstances changed so Mrs H went instead. Without being able to run, I mainly walked quite a lot to keep my FitBit happy (11,487 steps / 5.28 miles), and did the exercises I've been prescribed to get my ankle back on the road to running recovery. The main element is knee bends on a wobbly board thing; I wobbled the appropriate number of times, and did the other leg for good measure (and so I don't end up being horribly lop-sided!).

Posted Jan 29, 2014

I confess that, not being able to run, Janathon has turned out rather different from what I had hoped. My ideal outcome was to have run every day and boosted my stamina and range well beyond current levels; that's not how it's worked out at all. I've therefore had to console myself, largely, with lots of circuits and other similar non-runny things.

Posted Jan 29, 2014

After the success of Friday's pairs PT session, the weekend was a bit of a come-down. Saturday saw me taking the highly unusual step of having to go to bed for a few hours in the afternoon, and Sunday was equally quiet. I think I must have been going down with something last week, which has been pretty mild but with some kind of after-effect. This flat feeling is most unlike me!