Lockdown was a bad time for a lot of people, but overall it was not quite so bad for me. The major problem I had was that I put on a lot of weight and lost a lot of fitness. I’ve been trying to get that fitness back and lose the excess pounds, but it hasn’t been easy. I tried a lot of things but mostly exercise is exhausting and chocolate is delicious.

So the latest idea was to try a different approach. I read that ‘low heart rate training’ was a good way to gain fitness and lose weight without putting any effort in. This sounded like the programme for me, because there is no history of anyone lying about the benefits of these types of programme.

It’s pretty simple, you do a little calculation that works out a maximum ‘low’ heart rate – in my case 134 beats per minute and then you are off to the races, the very slow races. I also added in a daily 1 minute plank, because daily planks are also some kind of exercise meme.

So I decided to do 30 days of 5k at a low heart rate, because clickbait. And my word it is slow at first. 45 minutes to do 5k (3 miles), thats about the same speed as a fast walk. And I hated it. I took my gopro with me to bask in my successes but I looked back at the recordings and it is mostly me moaning, about the weather, about being tired. Basically everything I could complain about, I did, and because it’s 2023 I also recorded it so that I would become famous on youtube.

But, after a couple of weeks I did see some improvement. The 40-45 minute times started slowly to become 37-39. But I didn’t feel any better. I’d also been doing a weekly ‘fast run’at parkrun but they also weren’t getting any faster. Very quickly I devided that I wasn’t going to see much benefit after 30 days and so 30 days of 5k became 100 days of 5k.

At the end of september, we went to a family get together that included a disco. The youngest radling, 9 years old, decided he was too scared to dance. So I picked him up and danced with him, holding him under my arms. Wierdly it seemed this was possible and I could do it for a few minutes without struggling. This was the first time I thought that maybe I was gaining some fitness.

I’ve really only improved from there, I’m now on day 80-something, and most of the running is easy, with my time being all under 35 minutes for the last 15 days.

So, hot on the heals of the amazing sucess of my 30 days of 5k I’m now doing ’30 days of essay’ of which this is the four

Oh and, did I lose any weight – nope, I still love chocolate