It was 5C/41F when I got home. Now, the places some of you come from, I know at 5 degrees, you’ll be on the patio in shorts trying to catch some winter sunshine. Certainly not for one who has experienced only 5 winters in one’s lifetime. (And I’m not 5, by the way; otherwise I might just blitz that age group.) The rational, if somewhat procrastinating, part of my head also said it wasn’t a good idea to eat lunch and run in the same hour I had free, and the benefits of running with a cold would have only been for the ego, so I got on the stepper and did an easier workout after some oats.

I discovered one of the hydraulics in my stepper has gone bust – a hint for me to lose weight, maybe? – so it might be the time to think about alternatives for indoor exercise.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my goals...what I want to achieve from running and fitness. The main goal is a healthier lifestyle, of course, which I think I’ve achieved. Previously I thought that, for someone who aims to just run about 30 minutes three times a week, a sub-two hour half-marathon would have been good enough. The thing is that now I’ve done it, and know that on any given day I can crank that out on the same minimal volume of training I’m doing, I’m... bored. Maybe I should up my sights to doing a marathon, but the time commitment to training to run one properly seems more than I would want to give. I also know that I would probably be faster speed-walking a marathon (done that distance before with full army kit before) than run/walking it.. and a marathon seems like an extravagance for one who just wants to keep fit. But at the same time I'm already starting to get stale with the idea of improving my running times at the shorter distances. Where should the search for running Nirvana lead me?