I renewed my gym membership recently. I started going to the gym last year after getting into running via the c25k programme, but the weather was getting shitty and there had been an assault in the park I had been running in. I also wanted to add some more variety to my exercising, so off to the gym it was. After a month of working out on the bikes, treadmills, cross-trainers, and rowing machines I wanted to switch things up and push myself a bit further. So I started going to classes.

I started slowly with a bit of aerobics and some dance fitness, then gradually started adding and dropping classes until I reached the position I am at now where my schedule looks like:

Monday – Aerobics & Core Blimey (occasional Zumba of an evening)
Tuesday – Cubatone
Wednesday – Body Pump (occasional Ceroc of an evening)
Thursday – Amazon
Sunday – Yoga

I’d like to add more swimming in there, but my local centre (which I can walk to) is used for school swimming lessons so often isn’t available at times I want to go.

I’ve decided now that I should put my new found fitness to some sort of use other than just getting me round the place in a marginally healthier (I hope) body. So I’ve decided to go back to running, but this time to benefit others as well as myself, by fundraising through Just Giving.

The Bristol half-marathon took place on 30th September 2012. I found out about it far too late to put any training in (and training is required to go from no running to 13 miles). I got online and checked out Run Bristol to see what else might be on and saw that there was the Bristol 10km on 5th May 2013 and signed up. May 2013 is plenty of time away and I’ve run up to almost 10km before so it shouldn’t be too hard to get into shape for it (after all I managed a decent 5km time at Bungay when I hadn’t run for months).

I also saw that there was a 10km race in Ashton Court on 27th October 2012 and thought that might be a good practice race to see what running that sort of distance is race conditions is like, so signed up for that too. The official charity for that race is Cancer Research, so I’m going to fundraise for them (but no pressure on anyone to donate, I’ve made one tweet about it and this will be the only blog post about it, so don’t worry that I’ll be pumping people for money – there’ll be a link here on my blog and that should do it, I don’t like pushy fundraisers either). If you’d rather donate to Macmillan then there’s a page donating in memory of Luke Wilson here: http://www.justgiving.com/cubecheat.

I should probably get out to Ashton Court for one of the weekly 5km runs to get the lie of the land (but they start so early). Keep running!