Dry Dry January #2: A couple of tweaks

I had actually planned to write something else before doing this, but such is my extremely hectic schedule at the moment, I lost complete track of time and just never bothered doing it.

It means nothing at this point other than there are two articles in the same series next to each other, which annoys my brain slightly, but the promise of weekly updates on my torture ended up overruling.

As clearly stated in the title, I’ve made a couple of tweaks to the rules/conditions I set out last week and now you can hear all about them below.

Not following a programme

Last time, I said I would pick up one of my old running programmes from the back end of last year about halfway through and see it to the finish again.

But because I find that boring and not particularly challenging seeing as I’ve done it before, I decided instead to run 5km three times a week and knock something off my time with each run.

That might not sound particularly enthralling either, but in my head at least it’s a far greater challenge, especially as I’ve now made it annoyingly hard for myself by doing quite well in the first week.

My goal for the first run was to do it in under 40 minutes, which I did fairly comfortably in the end. However, I didn’t expect to have knocked off three minutes by the end of the week.

A new work schedule in week two and beyond might make this a bit more difficult to follow, but I think sticking to 5km is going to be the way forward for now.

Something to keep me going

As the rules set out only cover January, and the whole body and fitness issues are going to take considerably more than a month to deal with, I needed something to aim towards long-term too.

Someone I follow on Instagram who is a keen runner had been doing these online challenges throughout Lockdown 2.0 and I particularly noticed that the medals he got after each one were really nice.

I had a look and saw there was an Icelandic themed event, and given my weird soft spot for Nordic countries, particularly Iceland, I thought I’d have a go at that one.

It’s basically a virtual race around the ring road of Iceland, logging each run I do as I go along. At over 1,300km, I decided it’d probably take me most of the year to do that, so hopefully by Christmas 2021 I’ll have a shiny medal to ease the pain of the blisters on my feet from running a stupid number of miles.

How’s the rest of it going?

The rest of the rules centred around food/drink and sleep. One of those is going fairly well, and the other not so much.

On the drinks front, I’m finding it pretty easy – one coffee to aid with the waking up process, and nothing but water after that. I don’t drink alcohol much at home anyway and I’ve only really missed Dr Pepper from the others.

Food started well but has dropped off a little bit. I’m hoping that getting back to work next week will put me in a bit more of a routine with that (although it never exactly stopped me before). If anyone can recommend healthier things to eat when I don’t really need to eat anything then I’m all ears.

Sleep hasn’t gone too well. I set the Bedtime thing on my phone to tell me to go to sleep by 11pm every night and I think I managed it once. I’m pretty certain that will change by next week, though.

Overall, I’m happy with the first week. I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything in terms of weight, which I’m not worried about after only one week. However, I do feel like it’s done me good mentally and that’s as good as anything given everything that is going on at the moment.

The most challenging part of week two is going to be adding work into the equation, I think, but I’m confident I can stick at it.

I haven’t got a choice to, really, otherwise I’ll have nothing to write about on here…

Enjoy your week – stay safe and stay sane.