Who's doing my thinking?

I ran all of 2 miles this morning. I've been doing my basic 'mile and a third' so much recently that even the extra kilometre felt quite different.

I had so much chatter going on in my head this morning. No, I'm not losing it - I'm talking about that little voice we all have in our heads.

If you're now going, "What little voice?" That's the one I'm talking about.

Anyway, it was great to push that internal chatter off centre stage and concentrate on my breathing and my internal physical feelings. Such a relief.

Running is the best way that I have found to calm my mind and to regain some clarity of direction, of purpose, of vision, and of what really needs to be done next.

I thought how interesting it is that sometimes I can't seem to be able to choose my own thoughts. So if I'm not choosing them, then who is?

Now that's even more interesting.

And what is the purpose behind the chatter?

My best guess is that it's my subconscious mind telling me that I need to step back, that maybe things aren't working perfectly as they are right now. It's also an opportunity for me to refocus on, or even recalibrate, what perfectly looks like.

Once again, running is the best way I know to achieve this.

Some days it's a struggle

Having said before that my daily run had become almost 2nd nature, I've been finding it a real struggle over the past week or so firstly to get myself out the door in the morning and then to actually get into the run.

I've never come back and felt worse for having run or regretted going, but unusually it has almost been a neutral feeling on what it has added recently.

Still, the good thing is that after 266 consecutive days of running it would be a big decision to decide not to go because I don't feel like it.

I was thinking though this morning that it goes against all recommendations to run every single day without a day off, and yet here I am still running in old running shoes with split uppers and no inner soles, injury free right now. I hope I'm not tempting fate by saying this.

The lick of the pony

I was staying in North Wales this past weekend. After a 5-hour drive through the Friday night traffic, I got up on Saturday morning, pulled on my gear and went out for a couple of miles to explore.

Once again my morning run completely set up my fabulous day.

I followed a trail that led through a kissing gate into a field where I unfortunately startled two small ponies.

I carried on running and talked to them calmly, at which point the smallest of them, which I later discovered was 4 months old, started trotting after me. I carried on talking to it and stopped, and it came up to me and started licking my arm. It was absolutely delightful.

As well as putting a huge grin on my face, I knew this would make my 13-year old daughter's day, if not weekend.

She went down to the field and fed the ponies carrots twice on Saturday and again on Sunday until we left Wales to journey home.

What a delightful experience, and, once again, thanks to my mile each day.

It made my local mile and a bit seem quite mundane this morning, but I know that my run every day is the stuff of extraordinary possibilities!

St. Paul's Cathedral

My minimum mile and a bit this morning.

A nice sunny morning, although very wet under foot after a cloudburst overnight.

I'm glad the sun's out as my Mum's heading up to St Paul's Cathedral this morning as she has been invited to attend a service to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

It's interesting all the attention she has received lately since the story became known that she was one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers during the Second World War. As my Dad was a spitfire pilot, the pair of them would have been soaking up the attention if he had still been alive.

This morning my youngest daughter asked to take a copy of an article on my Mum that was in the paper to school for her history lesson. How the past and future entwine.

How appropriate then to quote one of my favourite of Winston Churchill's sayings, "This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure."

Two-thirds of a year

Today I completed my 244th consecutive day of running a mile each day and started the first day of my 9th month of doing it. In my book, I make that two-thirds of a year in the bag.

It doesn't seem at all bad when my original experiment was to see if I could possibly do it for 31 days.

It also doesn't matter that this morning my legs felt quite heavy, my left knee ached a little, I felt a twinge in my right quadricep muscle, and that I ran 1.3 miles about a minute and a half slower than I did a week or two ago.

What matters is that I am still doing it.

What matters is that every day I do it again, I am stretching what I believed I could do nine months ago, even further.

What matters is that every day I do it, I arrive home, pretty much every time, feeling better than I did when I left.

Nicky asked me this morning what would happen on 1st January, and I honestly don't know.

I don't know whether I will have still run every day to that point. Even if I have, I don't know whether I will want to carry on.

Having said that, right now I can't imagine making the decision to stop, at least without another challenge, experiment or adventure to replace this one.

Anyway tomorrow's another day and, I hope, another mile!