Euan Lawson
Monthly reflection on activity: October 2019
I do record most of my exercise activities on Strava°. It does make a difference to the amount of training I get done. I record my runs and cycles on my smartphone using the Strava app and I add other entries, like weight training, manually as needed. I’ve been doing it for several years so I have built up a good record of my activities and patterns.
It has been very helpful to get me through periods when I’ve felt less like exercising or when I’ve picked up injuries. Helpful in the sense that I’ve been able to maintain a base level of exercise and achieve a huge amount of consistency. That consistency has been hugely important to me. Typically I do about 250 hours of exercise a year - about 20-21 hours per month. I get the occasional month where I do a little less (perhaps if I have one of those niggly calf injuries I went through a phase of getting or I’m on holiday) and sometimes more (usually when I get a bit more cycling in).
So, I like to watch it weekly and if I do less than four hours I feel a bit crotchety. If I do about six hours or more then that’s a heavy week and I usually feel noticeably more tired. Curiously, it now almost never happens that I do more than seven hours per week and those are rare weeks indeed. Which, by the standards of many amateurs, is quite modest. Of course, by the general standards of the population it is plenty.
I aim for about 20 hours per month. In October 2019, as you can see, I hit 21 hours 14 minutes. A good solid month. There was over 14 hours of fell running, just under five hours of weight training, and a couple of hours on a bike. I’m particularly happy as I went through a bad patch in the middle of the month. I was very low, very demotivated, just struggling. I’ve no idea if I had a bug, maybe a virus lurking in the background, or whether it was some stress reaction or mental health thing. Who knows? My habit was good enough that I was able to keep plugging away with the exercise and the black cloud drifted off again.
I like to think the physical activity helped and got me through it.