Ireland day 1189. Monday 30 December 2024- Pace and Williams

Today’s summary	Decided to try and improve my walking pace and distance while burning off calories but not damaging hips. Managed an 11.3km route at 8m:13s/km, which was a good start. Val did some shopping in the morning and then we went to watch a slightly unorthodox film (“Better Man”) featuring Robbie Williams as a chimpanzee in the afternoon. Really enjoyed the whole day and it was especially nice not to have any specific commitments on the agenda
Today’s weather	Bright dry and breezy, feeling a little cooler than recently. Moderate to strong south westerly wind. Appx 9c

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Pace and Distance improvement circuit

Commentary

I’ve noticed that my walks have got slower and shorter recently, and at the same time I’ve been putting weight on. This is not a state of affairs I like, so today I decided to take advantage of a completely free day to start doing something about it.

My go-to sport in situations like this is running, but this has been ruled out by my hip surgeon. A couple of weeks ago, I tried scouts-pace as a halfway house to running, but found the frequent changes in pace a bit annoying. Today I decided to try a combination of approaches, to try and get the best of all worlds without damaging my hips. This meant walking as fast as I could for 1km, then jogging slowly for another km, and so on.

I devised a route round the demesne and down to the coast which I thought would be just over 10km – a good distance to test myself over. I duly set out at about 12:15, after a couple of cups of tea and an energy gel by way of sustenance.

In the end, the route turned out to be 11.3km long and I got round in 1h:34m:17s – a pace of 8m:17s/km. I was quite pleased with that, although slightly surprised to see that my slow jog was almost indistinguishable in pace from the fast walk. In the interests of knee and hip preservation, I might try just doing the fast walk and see how well I get on.

Once I got back, Val modelled the rather nice new outfit she had bought in the sales. She looks great! Then after the fashion show, we drove over to Swords to watch a rather unusual film (“Better Man”) – a biopic told and acted by Robbie Williams himself, modelled as a chimpanzee. It sounds bizarre but actually it worked very well and for much of the time, you completely forgot about the strange appearance. We really enjoyed the film and came back feeling uplifted.

More turkey curry followed on our return to the flat, then we sat back, relaxed, and reflected on a day blissfully free of prearranged commitments.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Locus Map app on my new phone seems to be working out well	Reaching the shore – I walked from here most of the way back to Malahide, as it’s paved with very little soft grass to run on over this section of the route

Robbie Williams’ life story – told and acted by himself as a chimpanzee. Worked much better than I expected and we thoroughly enjoyed it	Good job we booked! Actually, another half-dozen patrons joined us just before the film was about to start, so we didn’t quite have the cinema all to ourselves



At the end of the 11k circuit. I don’t look too bad though I shall have to see how I feel in the morning