It's been a long time

Hello, good evening and welcome.

It's been a very long time since I last wrote. I'm sorry. In my defence there's been a fair amount of crappy stuff going on both in running and personal life and that's always boring for people to read about. To summarise a few key events of the last while:

• I've more or less retired from running then unretired myself; 
• done a couple 100km races; 
• had my first DNF (due to hypothermia and being shit at running mountains)
• been crew at UTMB
• paced in a 100 miler
• put on weight

The personal stuff you don't need to know about. Except I think you didn't know that I was eventually diagnosed with a fracture to L4 or L5 which is why all the pain and not running and not being able to move much happened. It has never been treated because the diagnosis came too late, but I have regained some spinal mobility and the pain is now generally significantly less than it has been over the last couple years.

I also gave up kniting and gave away almost all my yarn stash and needles, but now I can sit for more than 10 minutes at a time without pain I'm starting up again. Here are a couple of recent knits:

Tiny Kitty brooch

Boris

Anyway, this year I actually have a 'proper' running challenge. It's quite ambitious but it wouldn't be a challenge if there wasn't a real chance of failure. And I want to use this blog to chart the journey over the next 9 months. The challenge? To complete a 100 miler, specifically the Centurion Running Autumn 100. I even have a proper training plan, put together by a friend who happens to be a former PT, but is also one of my senseis and a power lifter. It's far tougher than anything I've attempted before and I'm going to have to ease myself into it as even this base period is way more training than I'm used to, but it's exciting and I'm looking forward to the journey.