She Who Must Be Obeyed gave me this toy for Christmas and we are using it to help us log times and distances in preparation for the Semi-marathon de Nice at the end of April. I've actually run the thing three times before with times of 1h38m 1h37m and 1h45m (last year's result), and at a drunken pre-Christmas party I set my goal to be 1h29m59s or a mere 7 minutes faster than I've done it before. At the same party SWMBO allowed herself to be talked into running it too - although she's not aiming for anything more strenuous than sub 2 hours.
This post is about us nailing our trousers to the mast (so that, in the words of Yes Minister, we can't climb down). Progress has been pretty good. Due to a minor cock up in my use of the gadget I ran like the clappers on Wednesday and did just under 13km in just under an hour. I say minor cock up because I thought I was running slowly and kept pushing myself until I figured out that I was looking at the wrong counter. The good news is that means I only have to improve my speed by less than 10% in the next 12 weeks to make my goal, the bad news is that I'm not sure I can sustain the required pace because my increase in speed over the last couple of months has been somewhat asymptotic.
The advantage of running a good deal is that it increases the appetite, the advantage of living in the south of France is that there are many boulangeries within easy running distance - ignoring supermarkets there are at least 10 within a 2-3km radius from our house. We are deliberately running to buy bread and deliberately not buying bread without running first. At the end of this I shall probably be able to report on the baguette/Banette making capabilities of all of them, as well as what other bread they make that we like. So far we have identified a favourite for Pain Complet (Baptiste in Plascassier), Banette (Epi d'Or in Mouans Sartoux), Pavé (New one on the Av de Grasse in Mouans Sartoux) and Pain à Levain (Moulin de Mouans in MS). No doubt more will follow. And thanks to the gadget we know how far it is to each one...