In my last blog post, I shared the news of my bad back and how it was impacting my goal of being fit when I reached the grand ol’ age of 50. The good news is that after 3 weeks of inactivity, this week I’ve been able to get active again.

In fact, the previous week I was able to start the ramp up by walking regularly both during lunchtime walks as well as in the treadmill.

This Monday, I got back in my adventure bike and commutes to and from work. I felt my lower back aching a little in the evening so decided to alternate my cycle commute days by cycling Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday and Friday, I drove to work and then went for 30 minute runs. Tuesday’s was a little too early with a pre-6am alarm and a run that started while it was still dark.

As well as that, I decided that I’d try to walk around 2 miles a day. There are lots of health benefits of regular walking and this also acted as a great way to take a break from the office and a recovery from the cycling/running.

On Thursday morning’s run, I made the decision to complete 2600 miles of exercise this year through a combination of running, walking and cycling. That means 50 miles per week. I’m likely to achieve that with 30 miles of cycling, 10 miles of walking and 10 miles of running.

As well as that challenge, I decided to join my wife on Saturday for a swim. As mentioned in a recent post, I swam once last year. That amounted to less than 1 mile in distance – a far cry from the 100 miles I covered 5 years ago when I was training for triathlons.

Having zero swim fitness, I was pleased to complete 40 lengths of the pool.

With today to complete (a run is planned), it’s been a good week with Garmin summarising my activities below:

So far, so good.

So, my rough plan for the coming weeks will be something like:

Monday – cycle and walk

Tuesday – run and walk

Wednesday – cycle and walk

Thursday – run and walk

Friday – cycle and walk

Saturday – Swim

Sunday – run