Exactly 13 months ago, as it happens, I posted about starting a programme to go from zero exercise up to running 5k three times a week. I got pretty close to the target but then I had exams and the summer holiday and then the winter and I never finished. Well as of this morning I finally completed the programme, after restarting it at the halfway point or so about a month ago.

I still run pretty slowly and I still find it mentally challenging to get to the end. It’s occasionally a physical thing, but most of the time it is because I really can’t be bothered. I’ll stick with 5k three times per week for now, that’s really quite sufficient; at some point I would like to work up to 10k, using a follow-up programme, but that can definitely wait.

Instead I am thinking that I might work on some other aspects of physical fitness, while maintaining the three runs a week. Aerobic exercise is good but other things worth working on are: flexibility, mobility, strength—and I’ve certainly acted against the first two of these by running with non-existent stretching habits.

A few friends of mine tell me how great yoga is for the flexibility (obviously) but also for other positive physical feelings of being relaxed, stretched out etc. So I might try this with the new academic year in October; a university is a great place to do things like this, of course. Slightly pettily I would like to be sufficiently flexible to adopt a lotus pose for meditation; more seriously, being able to sit properly without support would be genuinely useful for this.

No idea about mobility—I am pretty clumsy, I can’t really walk in a straight line (though I have friends who are much worse), and I don’t know how I could improve on this.

For strength there is of course weight-lifting but I don’t like the idea of using all the fancy equipment this involves. At a more basic level there are bodyweight exercises like (advanced forms of) push-ups, pull-ups etc. Something to consider.

Just a few thoughts; I won’t be in a position to do anything about any of this until August/September/October.