I love this time of year. Plenty of inspiration from Wimbledon and the Tour de France and (sometimes) decent enough weather to get out there and train hard!

June is a bit of a double-edged sword though since it's also when school closes for the long summer holiday and nothing puts more of a crimp in your training schedule than having to keep a child entertained. Luckily, my boy is now big enough to do some training with me. It means adapting my routine and requires a little less rigidity from me but so long as I can keep active, I can stay sane. We played tennis this morning and he did some keepy-uppy (and pointed and laughed) while I did my hill sprints. The rest of today's training will have to wait till he is in bed. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't find that frustrating - I do! - but it's the best that's on offer at the moment. I cannot lift weights with him around. I have tried before and it was a miserable experience. I can't concentrate with someone talking at me the whole time. It's the same at the gym. During sets, the earphones go in, the gym face goes on and my headspace is my own. That's how I like it.

The clean eating is going well. I feel better already. It's something that continues to frustrate me - I know how much better I feel when I eat properly and yet I still go through phases where I don't and still manage to feel surprised when I feel like crap!
One of the few things that frustrates me about a high protein, low carb diet is the lack of crunch, or should I say crisp! I have a huge love of tortilla chips (hand me a big bowl of nachos and I'd be a happy girl) and I do miss those. I haven't yet found a replacement food which ticks all the same satisfaction boxes: savoury, spicy, crunchy, messy finger food. One thing that came close though are the cashew, walnut and sesame crusted chicken goujons we made. We scoffed them before we got a photo (oops) but they were surprisingly good. The nuts were crunchy on the outside,the chicken juicy inside and they held up well enough to repeated dippings in a bowl of homemade salsa. Win!

Kneehab is going to plan. I am woefully short on cardio fitness but no longer in daily pain so I can start to build that back up. Strangely, running uphill is more comfortable (for my knee, not my lungs) but hills do you good.

Just Keep Moving

Injuries have left me feeling a bit blah lately and with the blah comes the slacking off on the clean eating front and the drinking of too much wine. Put it all together and what have you got? A miserable, lardy, slug of a woman and that ain't me! Enough is enough.

I'm not going to focus on running events as a way forward at the moment. A 5K run is enough to trouble my knee so there's no way I can put in enough miles to enable me compete in anything. I've tried pushing through and that only resulted in pain when cycling as well as on the run. I think the thing to do is to stop beating myself up about it and focus on other areas of health and fitness so that once I'm fully recovered I'll be strong enough to get back into running with only a reasonable level of discomfort ;)

Over the next 30 days, there will be no alcohol and clean eating is back on the cards. I'll be sticking to a schedule which gives me an 8 hour long eating window each day in a bid to eliminate the late night munchies. This means fasted cardio first thing, followed by a late breakfast around 11am and staying the hell out of the kitchen after 7pm. I will also be doing press ups, crunches and squats (100 each day). This is not meant to do anything other than focus my mind properly. It's not a task which will be particularly physically taxing. It's more about the routine and getting myself tuned in to my goals again.

At the end of the 30 days I should be well placed to crack on with my next goal!

Overdue

Remember when you were a kid and you kept a diary or a journal? Yes? Good ... then you'll remember that you only ever had time to write in it when nothing was actually happening in your life. Turns out that blogging isn't much different!

There's a lot going on just now and I'm struggling to keep up with it all. I feel like everyone is getting a bit of a raw deal from me at the moment, like there isn't enough of me to go round. Ironically, there is plenty of me! Well, more than usual. Training-wise, I feel like this year has never really got off the ground. Running is being hampered at the moment by a niggly achilles (and the rest!) Unfortunately, it's also not comfortable when swimming. Time is hurtling on (apparently it's June already!) and I think I seriously need to re-assess what I'm going to manage race-wise. I'm not sure I'm in the right frame of mind to do that though. Currently, I'd just like to sack the whole lot off!

I won't do that but I do need to find a way forward and it's not clear to me just yet what that is going to be.