Funny walks

This is the year I moved up in my running to half marathon distance. Various memory tags recall the progression.

My first 21 km training run on 21 April made me over confident. I pulled a muscle in my knee two days later, which interrupted my running for 6 weeks.

My first half marathon race was on 6 July. Time just under two hours.

Then I embarked on a training schedule to improve my time and knocked 15 minutes off in my next half marathon just over two months later.

In the final half marathon of the year before easing back on the training, I knocked another 5 minutes off my time, while feeling much more comfortable on the run. My pace over the 21 km was 4:37/km, which also gave me my fastest 10 km time of about 46 minutes.

I am now going to concentrate of 5 km and 10 km races for a while to try to improve my pace further. My next race will be 10 km and I have a target to beat 45 mins.

I feel I am still a long way from my potential. At the moment I sense improvement will come from strengthening my leg muscles to improve power and technique.

On training runs I think about two aspects to strengthen my hamstring muscles: semitendinosus, semimembranosus and biceps femoris (long and short head). I'm cribbing this information from this website: http://lrgoodman.hubpages.com/hub/Muscles-Used-While-Running

At some point I think about pushing further back to strenthen the hip-flexing function of the muscles.

At another point, I think of the knee-flexing function, so lift my heels more powerfully.

It feels like I am Monty Python's Ministry of Funny Walks. Going from a flat, extended rhythm to a bumpy, bum flicking trot. Both exercises cause my legs to ache in a good way, telling me the muscles are working.

At inervals, I'll recover by easing back on these exercises. My achilles-flexing push-off then becomes more of a focus.

Then I try putting it all together, which is faster, but tiring. With time, as my muscles strengthen, I will hopefully become faster and less tired.

My 5 km time is already falling and consistently below 21 minutes. My next target is to knock a few seconds off my best time to drop below 20 mins.

Post office

This is another example of how this process of remembering every day that passes enables me to capture other information I do not want to forget. It helps me to remember the names of birds and trees, for example, something I previously found difficult.

Now I've applied it to remembering when the Post Office is open. My memory tag for Wednesday, October 15 is going for a coffee with my wife at lunchtime to a particular café. Instead of these visits merging into a single generic visit in my recollection I can now differentiate between them by something specific that happened.

So on this day we went via the Post Office to send a birthday card to a nephew. The Post Office closed at lunch time and does not re-open on Wednesdays.

Now I will remember.

The next day on the way home from work I called in at the central depot and posted the card there. I noticed that on Wednesdays it is not only open in the afternoon, but stays open until 8 pm. So registering that fact is in my memory tag. Having a common theme to consecutive days is one of the memory tricks I sometimes use.

Whenever I refresh the memory tags, I will remember when the local Post Office is closed in the afternoon - and that the depot is open late that day.

Thinking about you

My memory tag for October 16 this year includes the fact my wife went to the capital to visit a friend we have not seen for a while.

I was unable to go myself and when she returned she passed on our friends best wishes. They had tried to work out when we had last all been together.

As I can remember every day of the nearly three years since beginning this process, I was able to say immediately that it was July 16, 2012 and recount where we went and what we did.

It was made a little easier than it might have been as a few hours before I had run through the 16th day of each month as part of the process of refreshing the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags, so I had briefly relived the captured moment.

This is a strength of my current system.

As well as being able to remember people and events, I periodically bring them to mind. I can honestly say, 'I was thinking about you recently'.