Every morning I jog 2 miles, careful to keep my heart rate towards the lower end of the cardiovascular exercise range – around 65%. This ensures that I’m working my cardiovascular system and if it slows down a little I’m into the “fat burning” range, either way it’s good. It’s 2 hilly miles as well which gives me a few opportunities for a few sprints in there just to push things along a bit. So that’s 5 of those a week…

…at work, every Thursday, we play badminton for an hour. It’s fun, it’s energetic, it’s mostly aerobic exercise…

…today I started playing badminton a second time every week. So practice on Tues, play the league on Thursday…

…in the evenings I’ve started doing something – walk a few miles over the hill behind the house, a quick run, test my fitness using a multi-stage fitness test (aka bleep test), even cleaning the house which if you do it right can be aerobic exercise…

Throw into that the fact that I’ve cut down on my tea and coffee, replacing them with water and my eating has become a lot more healthy. Hopefully all this will work wonders and in a month or two I really will have lost some weight.

I do wonder however if I’m overdoing it slightly – I’m not sure if I’m tired today because I do too much, or if it’s because I didn’t sleep until late last night. Meh, early bed tonight I think…

Anyway, I have been doing some figures. My morning run is just short of 4km (2.5miles-ish). I can normally finish that run at the moment in about 55mins. That’s a long time I hear you runners say (do I actually know any runners?). In fact, it is a long time…given the assumption that you’re running a flat 4km circuit. I, on the other hand, live in Wales. Flat is what happens when the valleys flood, and even then you can’t really run on it. Flat is what happens when you get to the tops of the hills. Flat is the one thing my route doesn’t have in it.

With a bit of map-reading, it looks like I’m climbing about 150m from the start point to the midway point before turning around and going back down again (via a slightly different route). Just over 130m of that is over a 500m stretch of the first km – yup, that’s one hell of a climb. So, some rough calculations using the amended version of Naismith’s rule, gives me an estimated total trip time of about 1hr 15min at 4km/hr. So, given some figures about the fitness level I want to reach, I need to be running this circuit in….umm…carry the one….31 minutes. Right. What?!

31 minutes. Owch. Best I’ve managed so far was about 47 mins and that was a while ago.

So, some work to do then…look out for a fitter, healthier, slimmer Aled near you soon…