Inner Quests

Today is the last day of the Summer School programme for me. It has been essentially a five week return to full time work. I still have the admin work to do next week, contacting and guiding tutors with regards to the invoices they need to give me, returning registers to the Summer school, submitting my own invoice, doing my accounts for Netstorms and so on. In addition I have planned an after courses event at Little Ilford Centre for Saturday 25th, so I still have a lot of work to do, albeit unpaid, over the next two weeks. Nevertheless my time will be more flexible so I can pay some attention to tidying up at home and I can also move on as far as my running training is concerned.

For the past month I have been running about 2.2 miles at least three times each week. It has been good to have this constant discipline to hang on to even though I have neglected other areas such as my meditation. I have established the 2.2 miles as a distance that I can run without stopping but I need to step up my training if I am going to be ready for my 10 mile run on 28th October. I don’t want to do a loop so I will extend the area to what I call a ‘level 3’ distance of 3.3 miles:

The ‘level 3’ designation is a nod towards my mmorpg interests. I’ve been looking at a much longer, five and a half mile route, from East Ham Nature Reserve to Victoria Wharf via the Greenway and the Limehouse Cut. There and back will be eleven miles and so exceed my target distance by a mile. I’m sure that the first few times I try this I will be walking more than running.

I had gone to bed late and really did not feel like running this morning but I did. Once a habit or pattern, good or bad, has been established it takes on a life of its own and takes a deliberate effort to break; I think that has happened or is beginning to happen with my morning runs so it is easier to run than not to run.
 
I think that the running may be having some health benefits. I had been retaining water but seem to have flushed this out of my system, especially over the past 24 hours. I noticed that I weighed 3 lbs less that the same time yesterday, before my run.
 
The Daily Mile

The recognition that habits have a life of their own is not new; It’s obvious but it was brought home to me quite strongly by my running this morning. Another way of looking at habits is to see them as ‘sub-routines’ in our programming. From that perspective you could say that I need to identify the bad sub-routines in my programming and delete or re-write them and also write some good sub-routines.

I wrote on Facebook that

The year is half gone. I’m redefining my resolutions as ‘aspirations’.

The halfway point in a year is a good time to take stock. I have left many things undone and too many resolutions and promises unfulfilled. But I have not given up. There is at least one positive in that I am developing the habit of regular running. Something that has helped is the logging of runs on The Daily Mile website. It would make sense to record my yoga/meditation practice in a similar way.