A Short Coda to My Look Back At Last Year

I remembered, eventually, what I had intended to put in my year review post & forgot - health/running stats. So a short addendum:

I ran 873 miles last year, and walked another 286 (that I tracked, there'll be some missing). I did some sort of (tracked) exercise on 284 days of the year. I took 4,211,018 steps, according to Garmin.

I ran 3 races - Alton Water 10k (time: 1:04:08, much better than the year before), Twilight 10k (time: 59:01, sub-1hr & a massive PB) and the Great East Run (a half marathon, time: 2:23:55). I finally managed a sub-30min parkrun at Chantry (on the harder of the courses there) in July.

I started the year at 10st 11, and finished at 10st 6, which doesn't tell remotely the full story as I was between 9st 10 & 10st for the last quarter of the year until we went away for Xmas & that's in the range I'd like to be. Average resting heart rate across the year was 55bpm.

A Photo A Day for 2017

So last year I set myself the challenge of taking a photo every day throughout the year - I managed to take photos on 359 of the days, so made up the last 6 in the first few days of 2018. It was an interesting challenge, though by the end of the year it was beginning to feel more & more like a chore. And I found myself thinking each season that the next season would be easier (more flowers in spring! better weather in summer! etc).

One way in which it was a great success was that it got me over habits of perfectionism - in many cases I couldn't reject the photo as failing on this or that ground because the moment was over (or the day was over) so I had to use what I had. And often I got more likes on 500px for stuff where I could see what to me were glaring flaws rather than the photos that were technically more proficient. Another success along those lines was that I had to stop procrastinating about taking photos off the camera & processing them (and to some degree I've streamlined my workflow, or at least got quicker at it).

Re-reading what I've just written it sounds like it was terribly "virtuous" ... it was fun too! I've picked out some of my favourites (or at least those that caught me eye most this time looking through) below. One for the whole year, one per month plus one of the extras in 2018. The whole album is now up on flickr here - if you're so inclined, please tell me what your favourite(s) are :)

( 14 photos follow, rather long )