Saturday 27 December 2014

2014 review/2015 plans

Overall I am pleased with how this year has gone. At the start of the year I went for a check up at my doctor who said I needed to lose weight. I certainly didn't take it lightly as if the doctor says it then its time to do something about it!  So I did and when I got sent down to work in Leeds the next day I joined the gym in work.  In the 6 months I was down there although I did lose a stone, it was difficult  because I was eating out every night.  So when I got moved back to Edinburgh I decided to give running another try.  In the past I volunteered a lot in park run and ran every now and then. This time I decided park run was the perfect way for me to get back in to running and see my progression, so the volunteering had to take a back foot and I managed 15 park runs, improving my time by nearly five minutes since starting back in August. Although I was running 2-3 times a week, I was still not losing weight. So when I saw a challenge in November to basically stop eating crap for the month I took it on.  This would be the first time in my life I've ever taken up anything that resembles a diet.  But it worked! Through a lot healthier eating and continuing the running I lost another stone.

December I chucked the diet out the window to an extent and have not gone out for as many runs as I would have liked to, but I have still managed to maintain my weight at around 13 stone.  According to the BMI calculator I'm only 5lbs off a healthy weight but I really want to get down to about 11 stone as I think that would be a good running weight so that is one of my goals for 2015.

Which leads me on nicely to my other targets for 2015. Like many runners deciding what races/distances/training runs to do can change like the wind. I've toyed with the idea of attempting to do an autumn marathon next year but I think that is too soon for me yet.  So for now I'm thinking of making it a parkrun/10k year.  I would like to visit some new parkruns while getting back to volunteering again.  My main aims for park run next year is to join the 50 club both in terms of runs and 50 times volunteering (maybe even at the same time?!). At the moment I am sitting at 31 times running and 39 times volunteering. So that should be a realistic target.

For the 10ks I plan to do the Balfron 10k in April, Mens 10k in Glasgow in June, Great Scottish run 10k(if things go well I may change to half marathon) in September and the Kielder 10k in October.

Time goals

Bronze: sub 1 hour
Silver: sub 55 minutes
Gold: sub 50 minutes

Hope everyone has a wonderful 2015!