Last night I ran a pretty shonky 21:33 (~7m/mile) for the Bridge Inn 5km. I used to be faster but haven’t really been running since last year.

I also need to put on some weight because at 6 foot I’m pretty puny weighing in at 10st 9lb. According to the NHS weight calculator I should be over 12 Stone.

I’m setting myself the challenge of knocking 2.5 minutes off my 5km time (I’ve never run it under 19 minutes before) and reaching 12st 2lb before the Bridge Inn 5km summer series finishes on July 27th (the website hints there’s one in August but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong…).

I’m not sure how hard this challenge is going to be since I pretty much plucked the numbers out of the air. I also don’t know how to find out if I’m on track. Should I aim for linear gains and therefore expect to be half way to each of my targets halfway through the challenge? Or is there some kind of curved graph in which I get most the way very quickly but it soon flattens out?

Anyway, I’m sure it’s going to be tricky since they are both conflicting targets. The heavier I get, the harder it will be to run faster, but the more I train, the harder it’ll be to get heavier.

I’ll track my progress on here as often as possible. It should be an interesting experiment…