RED's Under The Bed (RED January 2022 prelude)
by Billy Ocean
It's got "RED" in the title, and it's a great tune, so it's in
The decorations are going away (or will be in a couple of days at least) and there is a fortnight's worth of relatively minimal movement with the entropy slope of an excess of calorific food and booze to overcome. And, so it begins again, on several levels. Firstly, I was doing a nice weekly blog on my running progress for about three months from spring into summer this year and it kind of petered out. Life has a habit of getting in the way of these things: holidays, work and a small boy who was getting increasingly difficult to put to bed, leaving less and less time to keep up with a regular posting schedule. That was then, this is now, so I'm resuming the blog in this format to chronicle my efforts to participate in RED January for 2022, no idea how frequently, but hopefully more than once a week.
And this is the second thing that begins again. This is the fourth year I'll have participated in RED January. The first year in 2018 I was going great until I went down with flu on 26th of the month. However, the next two years I completed the whole month and last year went into February, having an unbroken streak until 18th when it was my son's birthday. This year I'm hoping my knee, which has been a little disagreeable the last few months, plays nice and lets me get on with my RED commitments. It's a great thing to take part in as it does away with the winter blues and makes you feel smug for the rest of the year. Best of all it's organised by mental health charity mind to help raise awareness of mental health issues generally and also raise a little cash. You can see the Mind website and also the link to my RED January donation page on the left.
Anyway, the running took a bit of a back seat in the summer, partly due to the gym classes coming back, partly due to the knee, partly due to the amount of time I was out of the house to do my long run on a Sunday morning/early afternoon. I managed to do the odd run since, including a soujourn round a park near our hotel when we had a few days in Edinburgh and two organised 10K road races: Sheffield and Leeds Abbey Dash. I even did my first parkrun since before lockdown as my usual Saturday morning Step Aerobics class was cancelled one week.
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| Post-Sheffield 10K, 26th September 2021 |
And another thing that is starting is use of my new Fitbit Charge 4. I'd posted about fitness tech previously and had a lot of good use out of my old Huawei Band 4 but this wasn't compatible with Strava, so only posted my workouts as pictures of activity metrics rather than actual data. Looking forward to trying it out (I did an in-house Body Combat to blood it the other day so I know it works).
The idea of RED started to encourage people to run (Run Every Day), but it diversified to mean being active on every day. My RED January will again be mostly gym class-based, but I may do the odd run because it's easy to fit a quick 5K in at lunchtime at work if I have any commitments in the evening. I also want to try and fit in extra sessions of a late evening, I'm thinking some of the online Les Mills Barre workouts These are based on ballet moves and excellent for core and balance. Well, that, and I'll use any excuse to wear a tutu I can. I may even, heaven forbid, do the odd early morning workout at my gym which run on various days. I already booked into a 6:30 Spin class on Tuesday 4th January since the rest of the day is going to be blocked out.
So, my RED Jan theme song for this year (this is a new thing, I've never had a a Red Jan theme song before) will be this. Seriously, play this on your way to a parkrun and you'll be so psyched up that you'll shave minutes off your PB.
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