In with the New

The 2nd of January dawned bright and cold in London. By 7:30am there was a hint of blue in the sky and, could it be? Yes, the sun was making its first appearance of the year.

Outside my bedroom window the garden was slowly filling with colour. Inside my head was filling with cold. Mr N has had various forms of man-flu since Christmas Eve and they seem to have finally caught up with me.

However, it was the last day of the holidays, the sun was out and I need to run 30 miles this week. Of course I was going to run. To help, I tried a new trick to motivate me.

I’ve used MapMyRUN for ages to plan my runs but I didn’t realise that their free iPhone app could measure and time my runs. I take my phone with me anyway – why didn’t I know about this earlier? I downloaded it and set it to talk to me every mile, telling me my average pace.

It worked! I am always surprised when modern technology does what it says it will. The only downside is that it might make me go a bit too fast. The nice lady telling me my pace brings out my competitive side. “Only 8 minutes per mile”, she seems to be saying, “even though you were running 7 minutes 30″.

As a result, I ran faster than I have for a while. Probably not the wisest move with a cold. Here are the stats, which I will be quoting with irritating regularity from now on:

5.02 miles; 37:51 minutes; 7:35 pace.