Getting the balance

I ran for 25 minutes this morning. Yes, I know, that's nothing more than a warm-up followed by an immediate cool-down for some. Yet it was all that my unfit self could manage - the last time I ran, was on the day of the last post. "The Last Post" might as well have been an appropriate song to describe the slow death of my running over the past few months.

Today's run was at about 8 minutes per mile, and while I didn't feel as if I had slowed down much, my heart was beating so fast to compensate - at one point, 180 beats per minute. That's right, 180 beats per minute to move at 8 minutes per mile. Gulp. I should get out and run more, and while it sounds like an excuse, work really is eating into my life a fair bit.

Out of interest, I added up the hours I spent commuting and working this week. (I count commuting hours as work because when I'm commuting on public transport, I'm largely doing work-related stuff, not sitting down and dreaming or anything like that.) This week, a typical week for this time of year, I spent a total of nearly 76 hours doing work-related stuff. Add in the, say, 50 hours of sleep a week, and that leaves me with just 42 hours left in the week for everything else. One of my line managers likes to send emails at odd hours just to prove she is working at those times. Sometimes I'm quite tempted to reply, "You think you're the only one hunched over your computer preparing work at 11pm/6am/Sunday evenings?"

As a rule, I wouldn't trade family time in the evenings for running time - in any case, work has invaded a bit of that space, so the only time I'm ever going to run is early Sunday morning. I still walk the daily 4 miles over the course of the working day, and while I suppose it should count for something, I wouldn't count it as having the same benefits as a run. Running is not going to be the thing it used to be for me in the past few years, or even in the past year - not for a while, anyway. I'm not concerned now about timings, speed, distance; for now, "running" is just getting a 30-minute run in during the week, hopefully more than once, so I don't get (too) fat.

I've got a lot more to type but I've exceeded the time I allowed myself for blogging. Back to work preparations - toodle-loo for now!