Back on track

When it comes to sports I'm much of the accountant type of guy. Whether it's running, swimming or working out in a gym, everything gets noted down somewhere. For the latter I prefer the somewhat obsolete method which is a small black book containing handwritten notes. Nothing you'd expect from an otherwise rather tech savvy guy but it turned out to be most simple and transferrable way. If you're one of those lucky fellas who got themselves a membership in a top notch gym using memory cards in their machines then you would probably shake your head about this. But try keeping that data at home or transferring it to another gym, like when you're on vacation or after moving house - almost impossible.

Since my first participation at the StrongmanRun in Weeze 2008, I began to keep track of my running exercises a little more carefully. This is when I got myself a Nike+ system for my old iPod Nano and it's been a huge motivation and training assistant since then.

The big downside of all that self-monitoring is the part where you stop your activities for a while and return to them after a serious period of time. After recovering from an injury that dragged me down the last couple of months I blew the dust off my running shoes, sync'd my iPod with some running tunes and came across the last entry in my Nike+ database... September 8th, 2009.

Long story short, not wanting to give up on running I put my old condition to the test and actually didn't fail completely. Where I was facing joint pain after just a kilometre a few months ago and stopped before it got worse I now got over 8km which is nice.

So here's my early pre-new-year resolution for 2011: Back on track and completing the half marathon in 3 months.