Another blog with no readers

I already have one blog that nobody reads (dansinvestments.blogspot.com) - why start another?  Not for everyone else's benefit - I'll never publicise it or encourage anyone else to read it, although of course some people will come across it and may read a few posts.  It's a trick to make myself more accountable, thereby encouraging me to:

• Keep running.
• Set goals and deliver on them
• Face up to failure and work out what went wrong.

I already have a load of historical data linked from www.danieltebbutt.com covering the running I've done since March 2012.  I've run over 2700km, taken part in 9 races (one marathon, four halfs, three 10ks and a partridge in a pear tree 5k), and spent 267 hours running.  My heart has beat about 2.6m times while I've been running, which is about 1.3m more than it would have done if I'd just been loafing about the house.  I've done a 10km race in 46:30, which is probably my best race performance, 2 weeks after my most disappointing race, when I failed to beat 4 hours for the marathon.

I'm currently training for Sentrumsløpet in April.  I've recently acquired a running machine so I can run through the winter.  My current challenges are:

• I'm at least 4kg over a sensible racing weight, so I need to lose that by April.  Running regularly and exercising some self-restraint regarding food and beer should do the trick.
• I appear to be pretty unfit, based on my performance on the treadmill (see danieltebbutt.com/fitness.html for details).  I did a half marathon in September on minimal training, took some time off after that after the weather went cold and before getting the treadmill, and that appears to have knocked me back a pretty long way.
• Using the treadmill is really convenient, and I have no problem finding 45 minutes or so to use it in the evening, but I've not yet summoned the motivation to do a long run on it - and I suspect this is holding me back.
• I don't seem to make progress year to year.  I regularly stop training for a month or two at a time, and it seems that this is enough for me to lose any fitness I previously gained, so I start again from scratch.

I'll formulate some specific goals in future posts, and then track my progress against them.