A late lunch and a pair of wet socks - #Janthon Day 11

The picturesque walk to work

Apologies if you've seen half a blog today. I started writing it on the train this morning and hit publish as opposed to save as a draft.

At work, I do four short days (Monday-Thursday) so I can do the school run and a long day on a Friday. Even before Christmas, I had started to take my running gear with me on a Friday so I could take some time out of the office during my lunch break. Bleary eyed, I duly packed up my running stuff and set off for the station.

When do you start to write your blog posts? For some reason, my brain wants to try and compose my random ramblings at the point when I'm least able to record them - when I'm actually exercising! Today, although I was half asleep, my brain was starting to blog on the walk to the train (which explains the cock up on the train).

Gas Street Basin

The walking elements of my exercise today consist of my journey to and from the station. If you were watching Great British Railway Journeys yesterday, you would have seen Michael Portillo standing on Dudley Port station looking at his Bradshaw diary, no doubt trying to film in between the regular Virgin Trains that hammer past the very small station which is essentially a slab of concrete in between the two tracks. Despite my tiredness, I did remember to turn RunKeeper OFF before I got on the train (I have forgotten before only to be reminded a couple of hundred yards down the line when you get the audio update of your split times through your headphones).

On arrival at Birmingham New Street, it's a short walk to Brindleyplace where the office is located. My preferred route is through The Mailbox and along the canal towpath (surprise surprise). It's just nice to get that extra bit of peace and quiet before rejoining the hustle and bustle of city and office life.

You can never tell how busy you're going to be when you come back into the office after Christmas - not helped by a couple of colleagues hinting on facebook that a decision had been made they weren't happy about. On arriving at the office, I found there were only going to be about 6 people on my team (usually there are at least 10), so I knew it was going to be a busy one. The 'decision' was unexpected, but is at least logical and there's nothing to do but make the best of it. At least no job losses are required. For 2013, I'm adopting and modifying slightly the prayer of serenity as far as work is concerned:

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." In the absence of wisdom keep your gob shut - or at least think before you speak!

Usually, I try and take lunch around 12pm, however with staffing levels and meetings, this was impossible, so I grabbed a bite to eat and then went to lunch at 2.15pm. It was quite a nice day outside and I had completely forgotten that it had rained recently. The towpath around the National Indoor Arena is nice and solid, however as you start to make your way out of the city, the surface is uneven enough to make lots of frequent puddles. In my dozy state this morning, I hadn't picked up a spare pair of socks so I was really trying to avoid puddles. At one point I wondered whether I was running, skipping or dancing as my stride was so uneven. Unfortunately, as hard as I tried, around the 1.75 mile mark, there were a couple of muddy puddles that were simply unavoidable so I was destined to spend the afternoon at my desk with wet socks.

Towards the end of my run, I realised that I was going to be a little short of 4 miles, so a quick change of route and a lap of Oozells Square completed my run and cleared my head for the afternoon. That's 15 hours of exercise done in Janathon so far and my 110 mile target looks like it should be easily met as I only need to average 0.84 of a mile each day. So I'm upping the target to 125 miles in total - something new to aim for!

Walking:
Distance - 2.67 miles
Time - 44m 25

Running: http://runkeeper.com/user/plockplock/activity/141309965
Distance - 4.02 miles
Time - 48m 45

Total today:
Distance - 6.69 miles
Time - 1h 33m 10

Janathon:
Total Distance - 93.18 miles
Total Time - 15h 37m41
Miles remaining - 31.82