Around the world and back again

It's been a while. What have I been up to? What have you been up to?

Hi all,

It’s been a while but I’m back. And it’s kind of weird. After not having written for an entire month, I don’t know where to begin. So excuse this basic post as I flex my writing muscles and fingers again. This post will be good news / bad news, photos, and milestones. Back to more usual posts later this week.

Let’s start with some of the good stuff.

I’ve been around the world 2x and didn’t get Covid

It was good to see my friends and family in London again, and I took our eldest daughter with me this time too. She is double-vaccinated and able to tolerate wearing a mask for the 36 hours of travel - whereas Miss 5 and Miss 3 would definitely have trouble with those protections. We both stayed Covid-free for the entirety of our trip, including isolating for the first 3 days to protect my 80+ year-old parents. This means I’ve now been around the globe twice since April, masked all the way and having had 4x vaccine shots, and have evaded Covid. Well, at least any symptoms of it anyway (even though I randomly RAT tested even with no symptoms too).

I kept running and stayed injury-free

Not only did I complete Phases 3 and 4 of my self-designed return to running programme, I also ran a couple of events.

First, I coached my 11-year old daughter through her first ever 5K run. She had it in her head that her limit was 2.5K - because that was the furthest she had run before. I wanted to explode that myth. So, we chose a low-key parkrun event (thank you Southall parkrun for making us feel so welcome), and we discussed a strategy. We ran for one minute at an easy pace, and walked for 1 minute, and repeated that until 3.2K. I noticed that this was well within my daughter’s capability, so we jointly decided to cut the walking sections to 30 seconds. She managed this well until we got to 4.65K when we decided to just run to the end. I’m so proud of what she achieved.

I returned the next week and ran the parkrun myself to benchmark a 5K time for further training. I managed 29m15s, which was below my target of 30 minutes. And although I was sore for a couple of days afterwards, I’m really pleased to get this time, and stayed injury free and strong through my return to running. More details in further posts.

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Now, some not so encouraging news.

I didn’t get the book deal

Over the past two years, I self-published two books and got a book deal for my most recent release, Finding Calm. And although this did well, I have not secured a deal for my latest idea. So, I’m going to have to figure out what I do with that news. And that might take some wider figuring out about how I’m spending my time.

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Finally, I did a talk and I had a great time

Speaking of figuring out what I’m going to do next, I gave a talk and took part in a panel session yesterday at New Zealand's Emergency Communications Conference 2022. I had a ball, and I think it went down well too. I love being able to contribute like this.

I hope you are all well and happy, and I’m looking forward to writing more over the next days and weeks again. Thanks for being here (and if you’re new, welcome - here’s what my Substack is all about).

Cheers,

Sarb