End of the first month of 2018

With January coming to a close, a quick update on my progress this month. My half marathon training is drawing to an end, and I've got just over a week until race day. The training has seen my mileage increase massively and I've now covered nearly a quarter of my target distance through the Under Armour You vs The Year challenge for the year in 31 days.

At this rate I will hit the 300 km marker during my the Worthing Half Marathon race on 11th February.

I mentioned I had order the Suunto Spartan HR Baro in my last post, and I've now been using this a few weeks. Really like the watch and battery life is excellent as well as the support that Suunto provide. I've joined a beta program for a new app for the watch and it's been great seeing the feedback the company gives and receives on this program and certainly seem to be listening to customer feedback as they develop the new app. Right now I'm syncing into Strava still and can't see me changing that but the detailed stats the watch produces is much better than I was seeing from the Apple Watch. I still love the Apple Watch and that is still on my wrist.

Another challenge I set myself this month was to fill all my activity rings on the Apple Watch through January as well as workout everyday. As it stands, I only have my Stand ring left to fill today and with only 7 hours left to record at 09:56 I think I can assume I'll achieve that goal.

I'm now pretty much doing 10km runs as my short runs 4 days a week or so, with a long 21km+ run on a Sunday. I'm amazed how much fitter I have become in such a short space of time, although getting the longer runs in means getting up much earlier and right now the weather hasn't been brilliant!

I haven't spent a great deal of time in the Gym this month, but after I get the next race out of the way I want to focus a little more on strength to fully prepare me for the marathon in April. In between the Half and Full I have now signed up for the Lancing College 10k. This is a new race and pretty much on my doorstep so a good option for me.

I've rounded the month off with my fastest 10k and last weekend managed to hit my objective for the Half Marathon of 2 hours on a training run. Happy running!