It’s been nearly ten years since I started blogging about running 10k. Like many people I started running looking for balance at a very stressful time in my life, and ten years later I still run for mental health, to help manage stress and busy periods. I also love getting more outdoors and the headspace that comes with clocking up the miles.
From the first beginnings of my running journey, that’s always been a distance that I enjoyed training for. It’s long enough to be challenging but not so long that you get too many injuries. It takes (for me) just over an hour, but not three or four hours and thus even “long run Sundays” aren’t too disruptive. It’s a fairly social distance, too. Easy to do together.
Between 2017-2019 then I did A LOT of running, but after that pandemic life got in the way, and from 2020 onwards, I had many false starts getting back into it and finding my stride:
For literally years I started and stopped, never finding a path forward for more than a few weeks. There was a lot happening in life and other priorities kept popping up, as well as long term injuries that stopped most exercise in its tracks for 18 months or more.
Then a year ago, I set out on a new plan, scaling back my ambitions to what felt more achievable, and embarked on my year of 10k in 2025. I kept blogging about it, more to offer myself some encouragement than anything else:
And now, as autumn rolls around once again, I am looking at the medals I’ve collected over the course of the year, and I can’t quite believe that it’s actually happened. I have been running for over a year, and along the way I kept to my 10k promise, completing four of the five races I had signed up for this year.
Yay me!
Together with my husband I motored through a year of training, a year which didn’t make consistent exercise easy, and one which threw enough curve balls to derail our efforts every couple of months. There was the day when it rained so hard we skipped a race and stayed at home, the month we got married and training went out of the window and the endless weeks of rainy weather that come with living in the green land of South Wales. My training chart thus never looks perfect, and my body had other plans than running for some of the year, too.
But.
I did it anyway. And I am so pleased that I’m back at it. Now, where’s that Half Marathon training plan…?