New Year Re-solutions

I’m not a massive fan of New Year’s resolutions, especially because January is cold and miserable enough already, without setting yourself up for failure. However, I do have a couple of aims I’d like to achieve as follows:

1) Update my blog more! After December’s blogging drought where I accidentally wrote a grand total of a big fat zero blog posts, oops, I resolve to not let anything like no inspiration, or having a broken mobile handset (STILL not resolved) get in my way

2) Take more photos and post more on Flikr. One of my birthday presents was a fabulous new camera which is tiny enough to carry around most of the time, so no excuses

3) Run another 10k, but quicker than I did last year

So, we’ll see how I get on throughout the year shall we?

PS, the photo is of the London Eye midnight fireworks on New Year’s Eve, which were brilliant. Happy New Year!

The Human Race

I took part in the Nike Human Race on Sunday – the annual Nike 10k run, but this year with a twist. People in 26 different cities ran on the same day, with the aim of competing to find the winning city with the quickest average race finishing time.

The London race started on rainy Sunday evening in Wembley Stadium, with all 20,000 participants in red t-shirts (which matched the seats, and co-incidentally my hair). There were four waves of runners – yay wave 3! – and a random but fun pre-run concert with Pendulum and Moby.

A couple of techy things I really liked about the race:
* Each runner was given a chip which measured times at start, finish and various points throughout the course. This information was constantly fed back to big screens around Wembley to show London’s overall position versus the other competing countries. London finished fifth overall, ahead of France and Australia
* Receiving a congratulatory text immediately after the race with my time and average speed per kilometre - I finished in 1.07.01
* Being able to log in to the website to see my pace across the course, position overall (135668th – go me!) and via city (11320th in London)

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of exercise (apart from Wii Fit, which I LOVE, because it tricks you into thinking exercise is fun – and where else can you run round a park with ‘celebrities’?) but despite the pouring rain, hilly track, and the ‘scenic route’ round the back of Tesco car park, I really enjoyed it. Although judging from my muscle-ache, it might take me a whole year to recover in time for the next one…

The official post-race Facebook group is here, with personal photos and video clips participants have uploaded.