My New Year’s Objective

Run a marathon. That is deliberately not a typical New Year’s resolutions where you might try to give something up or do something every day. The problem with those is that as soon as you miss one day you tend to give up. Instead I thought I’d set myself a target which will keep me motivated throughout the year and in turn prompt me to keep up better habits. One of those habits would be to run 3 times a week and after the first week of the year, I’ve already failed as I’ve come down with a cold so I’m resting. But I’m not giving up on the objective…

I’m aiming to complete the Abingdon marathon in October. Sub 4 hours would be good, 3 and a half would be amazing. I’ve already booked in for the Fleet Half in March as my first ‘milestone’, and then the Newbury 10k in May.

There was a time when I was considered the serious runner at Intuita. Now I’m way down the pack, not because I’ve dropped off but we’ve since grown and hired some super fit people. One of whom (Liz) convinced me to start my first running training plan, which admittedly wasn’t much of a plan but it was a start!

We’d talked a lot about running but only just went out together for the first time just before Christmas. Before we went on the run, I showed Liz some charts my GPS watch creates from previous runs, including one of my cadence (the number of steps per minute). Just from that she knew my running technique was all off, which was a little bit disheartening but a great example of the power of Data Viz. And it turns out she was absolutely correct and has given me some more pointers.

Below is a before and after of our run – yes, the others both ran with me even though I seem to be the only one sweaty and tired!