A plea for help...

It's 6.15pm on a Thursday evening and I am typing on my Mac with a cafetière of vanilla coffee brewing (smelling truly delicious) and a four pack of Flakes. This is not how my Thursday evening was supposed to be - I should be on the treadmill sweating out the minutes until I can hop off knowing that I've done a reasonably good job at continuing with my training. 

This is a problem I am continually having. I am a person of routine and if my routine alters, even a tad, I am in all sorts of trouble. 

Working 9 to 5 means that I am lucky enough to have plenty of time to go straight from work to my Dad's gym and be home by 6.30pm - giving me time to shower, have a cuppa and cook dinner ready to eat at the strict time of 8pm. 

Yet today, I made the terrible mistake of making a detour to Blockbuster. This detour lost me 45 minutes and has left me with five terrible DVD's I need to watch in the next 7 nights, four flakes that must be consumed in the same amount of time and minus one much-needed run.


I can find something that 'needs' to be done pretty much most evenings if it means I can get out of going for a run. I have even resorted to blaming the weather, which would be fine if I was running outdoors, but I'm not! 

I'm running in my Dad's homemade gym in his garage, which I hasten to add has a heater for days when it's freezing, a fan for days when it's boiling, is completely water tight and even includes a gigantic HD TV with surround sound, DVD player and a load of other stuff I don't know how to use, so frankly, weather complaints are not an option. 

To solve this problem I have come up with an ingeniously original idea to create a 'training plan'. This is possibly something my colleague Jan Ryder has been attempting to get me to do for a while now. Her subtle hints of emails with links to great training websites, countdowns until race day and those 'suggested' training plans she's accidentally left on my desk seem to have gone over my head. 


I think it's about time I started to take some advice, create a plan, and most importantly stick to it. 


So, I'm going to make a plea for help. At the bottom of this page is a comments box, I'd be hugely grateful if you could provide me with advice. Advice not only on how often, how hard, how far and how quickly I should be running, but also how to stay motivated, how to add running into part of my weekly routine and more importantly how to ensure I don't put off training for a night in with pizza, trashy DVD's and a disgustingly obscene amount of chocolate.