No conditional love

Best run I've had in two or three weeks this morning.

I went a bit later, the weather was, and still is, just glorious, I did just over 5K and the sweat was pouring off me. I love that.

I spent a great evening last night with 3 other really inspiring coaches and the conversation was truly uplifting. That was what was going through my head on my run this morning.

There were several great reminders for me, such as that as a coach my job is just to hold the space for my client, and that there is no such thing as conditional love, there is either unconditional love or it isn't love.

I am excited about what this day will reveal.

Riding a bike in the drizzle

I added just over two extra miles to Nicky's and my "mile and a bit" again, which gave me a total of three and a half miles this morning.

Got out on my bike, to get to and from a client appointment, for about four miles after a misunderstanding about who needed the car. I really enjoyed it even though it started drizzling pretty much as soon as I left home. Putting aside all environmental arguments, I prefer being on the bike than in the car apart from in extreme weather conditions.

New Facebook page

After struggling a little working out how to do it, I eventually managed to get a new Facebook page up - "Run a mile each day".

Completed day 75 of a mile each day this morning.

When the weather's like this sometimes it seems a shame to go so early and miss the warmth of the sun, but it does work so well to get the day off to a great start. Running later would somehow be trickier in helping the rest of the day flow.

Another couple of quotes from "Born To Run" - "Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast and their fast runs too slow... So they're just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants."

The second quote is "The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold - your hard-breathing point..."

So that seems to confirm that my running with Nicky, below my aerobic threshold, is actually good for me. Not that I would consider myself a distance runner at this point in time!

Day 66 - another extra mile

Although I didn't post to my blog yesterday, I did still run my mile.

Today I ran a mile with Nicky and then did an extra couple myself, so I completed just over three and a half in total, my highest for a good couple of months.

Another absolutely gorgeous morning, cold but glorious. There was a bird in our back garden, just as I was waiting for my GPS device to find a signal, doing the most beautiful singing. It really did lift both our spirits even higher than they were.

Very pleased that we knuckled down yesterday morning and cleared most of the rubble from under our floor to allow it to dry. Three sorties to the tip then followed, and then a warm glow of satisfaction from a job well done.

My Rosie Swale Pope book arrived from Amazon yesterday and I've already read the first two chapters. What an amazing, inspiring and yet ordinary (I guess that's where extra- ordinary comes from) woman she is.

I'm dumbfounded as to how little publicity she received for such an incredible feat!

About beasts, running and life

Ah, Saturday morning means weekend, means getting up a little later.

I still haven't pushed myself beyond the one mile yet, the weather is not enticing enough or there's too much to do. I have any number of reasons, but the truth is I'm not inspired enough yet to do it.

Since finishing Born To Run, I can't get inspired either by the novel I'm reading, so I've ordered Rosie Swale Pope's book about running round the world solo. I'm looking forward to receiving that some time next week.

Do you reckon I might have tendencies that could be bordering on the obsessive (Nicky you don't need to comment on this one) at times? It does seem that when I get enthusiastic about an idea, it percolates everything I do. Maybe that's just what being passionate is?

I do tend to see running, and my experiences when I'm running, as a fantastic metaphor for life as a whole. For example, the following quote from Born To Run (for a change):

“You can’t hate the Beast and expect to beat it; the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.”

That's just so relevant to any aspect of life. Along the lines of "what you resist, persists", and that you can only change a situation once you accept that it is as it is, and then choose to change it.