Where Did February Go?

I think I just blinked and missed February!  Where did it go?  I last posted on 1st February and now it’s the 28th!  I’ve been busy but I’m sure I could have found time to at least write and post 2 or 3 times during the month.  Oh well, I’m here now and I can try to do better in March.

So what’s been happening?

Well, I had a few good runs – more on that later because I had a REALLY good run today 😀  I’ve also been really busy with work and have set up another new business.

So, first the new business.  I’ve been using Forever Living’s aloe products for over 4 years and last month I decided to take the plunge and sign up as a Forever Business Owner with my friend (and Forever distributor) as my sponsor.  When I signed up, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try to make a go of it as a business but calculated that due to the amount I spend on the products, I could easily get the money I spent on the New Distributor pack back within a year even if I don’t sell to anyone else.  I’ll then be making a saving and, therefore, effectively earning after that.  Forever Living have supplied me with a website 🙂 and I have set up a website/blog for myself to cover the Forever products and the Younique ones too.  It’s still under construction so please bear with me while I work out how to create a blog on WordPress.org rather than WordPress.com.

Now for the running and other exercise.  Unfortunately, I had to change my Jantastic goals for February – I had to take the swimming out – as my shoulder has been hurting and I pulled it during a Personal Training session.  I was doing a reverse pull-up and pulled my shoulder as I was going down.  I’m not entirely sure what happened but I think I went down too fast and my shoulder just gave way and cracked.  My trainer thought I’d pulled it out – he keeps waiting for it to happen as I have a funny shoulder which really looks unstable but isn’t as unstable as it looks – as the crack was so loud.  Fortunately, it was fine and I just pulled the muscles.  It’s taking a while to fix though and I can’t rotate my shoulder all the way round so can’t do front crawl in the swimming pool 😦

The running has been good this month though.  I have run every week at parkrun – twice on my own as Adam was lazy and didn’t want to get out of bed!  The two times Adam came with me, he decided at around 3K that he didn’t want to start running after one of the walk breaks so I carried on and left him behind.  I think I finished about 2 minutes ahead of him on both occasions.

The first run in February was quite slow – 32:34 – now my PB is under 31 minutes (30:32 on 17th January), I wanted to try to beat 32 minutes every week.  The second week was one of the runs I did on my own and I got back under 32 minutes with a time of 31:22 and last week was faster again at 31:08.

I have also been running at least once a week on my own and have tried to run at least 5K on each run.  My solo running has been 4km in 26:59, 5km in 32:55, 5km in 34:58 (with Adam) and 7km in 44:10.  This week’s 7K is the longest run I’ve done since the Leeds Abbey Dash in November last year and the longest solo run I’ve done in over a year so I was really pleased with that.  All of my runs this month have been done on a 5:1 interval.

Today was a FANTASTIC run.  I was on my own again today as Adam decided he didn’t want to get up.  As I was on my own, I decided to start fairly close to the 30 minute pacer with the thought that if I kept him in my sights I could, maybe, get under 30:30 and get a new PB.  It worked.  I started off steady with a first km of 6:18, which is my usual pace after the first km.  I then sped up with splits of 5:48, 5:43, 5:47 and 5:25.  I caught up with the pacer just before I got to 4km and he called out to me saying “well done”.  I told him that I’d be walking in about 20s so he’d be going past me but that I would catch up with him again.  After the 2nd km I had decided that I was going to beat 30 minutes today.  I caught up with the 30 minute pacer with about 250m to go.  Finishing time was an amazing 29:21.  I knocked over 1 minute off my PB!  I don’t think I’ll be getting back down there again any time soon as it was REALLY hard but I felt wonderful when I finished.

February was great, even if I didn’t know whether I was coming or going and was extremely busy.  March is looking like it is going to be even busier as I really want to get my businesses off the ground and continue to maintain my improved running speed.  I’m also hoping to get in to the gym a bit more and make some improvements there too – shoulder permitting.

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