Moving House, South Devon Trails & Auto-Belaying

The past few weeks have been pretty busy for me, despite being the Easter holidays. I came home from uni on the 8th, which gave me five days to pack before moving house to an old village shop that my parents renovated themselves in the space of 12 weeks. When we moved in there was no shower, no kitchen lights and, worst of all, no wifi: until I traveled down to stay with the BF almost a week later I had almost total radio silence (first world problems, I know). But now I'm back in Swansea and can write a blog post in order to procrastinate writing my essays!

On the Saturday before last, me and mum visited Bideford parkrun, which is the closest one to the new house. It's a very fast and flat 3.5 loop course, and while walking to the run briefing we got talking to a parkrun tourist who is currently trying to run at every parkrun in the south west, having already run at every one in Wales. He also said that he'd signed up for the same 10k race that I've entered in September, so hopefully I'll spot him amongst the 3000 other people competing.

While visiting the BF, we went for a 2.6 mile trail run, following a river through some woods and into the town. The scenery was so beautiful that we had to stop every few hundred metres to take photos!

On the Thursday, we took the train to Exeter to go climbing at the Clip & Climb. This is the more "fun" area of the climbing centre, although no less challenging than the uni climbing walls, and instead of having a belay partner the climbers were attached to auto belay machines. I hated the auto belay machines. It took about half of the session for me to trust them, and you had to be clipped into and out of it by a member of staff, so there was a bit of waiting around between finishing one wall and going onto the next. But other than that, the wide variety of routes, as well as the difficulty points system, made it a pretty fun experience!

After climbing, we took another train back up to my house, and in the morning before we left for uni, me, mum and the BF attended Tamar Lakes parkrun on the Devon-Cornwall border, which was my home parkrun before my break from running last year. I was pretty pleased with myself because I ran the whole 3.1 miles without walking!

advantage of having a boyfriend who is faster than me: he can wait at the finish to take photos ;)

Since returning to Swansea we've done a handful of runs, including a 5k to the waterfront museum today, and yesterday I watched the London marathon coverage. Between Josh Griffiths beating all the British elite runners despite starting from the masses and Matthew Rees helping another runner to the finish, Swansea runners got a lot of attention on social media, which is weird since I can see where the Swansea harriers train from where I'm sitting now.

Hopefully now that I'm back at uni I can post more often, but for now I have an essay and a presentation to write :(

How To Trick Yourself Into Being Active

I somehow managed to go outside and actually do exercise 4 times this week. This is such a rare occurrence that upon entering the flat kitchen in running gear, several flatmates voiced their surprise that I went outside two days in a row. 

pictures or it didn't happen

Even I was surprised that I dragged myself out of the warm confines of the building and into the typical welsh weather wind and mild drizzle, but I'm putting my sudden motivation down to these factors:

1. If I don't move, I may become an integral part of the sheets and become a human-fabric chimera
2. I rediscovered Strava and remembered how much I like looking at the statistics
3. I can't let the BF be better than me at something I used to be almost okay at

The initial motivation for going into the cold and going for a run only lasts a few weeks if your reasons for running only consist of "it'll be good for me". It's very easy to look out of the window and put it off for later/tomorrow/next week/never. A reliable exercise buddy or group can help to keep the habit up until you show a visible improvement, which will motivate you further. 

Being a university student has given me the great opportunity to join sports societies, such as the Mountaineering society. The fun and social atmosphere outweighs the effort to actually get out there, and this week, after four weeks of attending, I met my goal to get to the top of the green route. Although this is the second easiest route on the university wall, I felt a massive sense of achievement considering my arms greatly resemble spaghetti and have no strength in them at all. I also noticed that I was a lot less nervous about the height, and my goal for next week is to get past a particularly nasty part of the blue route, which involves gripping a small hold with both hands and trying to pull yourself up.  

Leave tips for staying motivated in the comments!

Rowan