A previous boss taught me that “you can’t manage something until you can measure it”. You have to be careful to measure the right things, obviously …

… but I got thinking about how I use my time. At work I have to measure my time, though no-one knows quite how of why its used. But how I use my ’spare’ time is important to me, so I decided to start measuring it. Then I’ll know whether I need to manage it better.

After some hunting and testing I settled on KronoX, a simple open-source application for Mac OS X to record what I do. I started by just tracking my sleep, and then moved onto the main types of chores, relaxation, ministry and (inevitably) my work hours. These are the things I could change; I’m ignoring meals, and getting up, and other things I can’t really do much about.

I started with my sleep patterns. Just how much sleep do I really get? Here’s one view of it …

(Hour intervals run 10pm to 11am from left to right. Amount of sleep in the hour is shown by how dark the blue colour is. The days go down the page.)

Nice graphic, but lots of not-very-encouraging holes where I wake up in the middle of the night. Further analysis shows that maybe it’s not as bad as it looks: I’m still getting on average of 7.6 sleep hours per night.

I’m continuing to work to produce more interesting analysis and graphs from this, but there I’ll pause for now.

This morning I ran in the Cheltenham 10k race. I was much less apprehensive, as I’d done one 10k before. But it was colder, and much windier than the Evesham Vale one back in July.

We forgot to take a camera to the racecourse, but here’s a picture of my race number and my medal. Don’t worry – I didn’t get close to winning anything! – they kindly gave a medal to every finisher. But I did manage to beat my previous time, and come in under the hour: 58min 15secs. I was dead chuffed, and quite a bit puffed too.

Well done to Bob, JJ, Rupert, Ian, Tommy and Hazel who also were running in it, most of whom finished rather more comfortably under the hour.

Hmm. There are 3 different 10k races close by in late September and early October. I don’t have the energy or commitment to do more than one. So, should it be Cirencester, Cricklade or Cheltenham?

Whichever, I do need to manage rather more miles a week. But at least I clocked up 100 running miles, since I started running again a year and a half ago.

I was interested to see how consistent I’ve been in time and distance, so I have learned a bit of the R statistics package. And here’s the result:

And here’s a little graph of which length runs I do most often …

Quite neat.

Despite it being two months ago, I feel I should post my thoughts on my first 10k race. The Evesham Vale 10k was (in my non-existent experience) well organised, and as I hoped good for a first-timer.

Before and at the start it was drizzling persistently, which made me nervous: was it going to rain throughout? But after a few km it had stopped, and the sun had come out by the finish, which was great for the celebrations.

There was much nervous milling around on the side roads of the town, with some apparently wasting energy by sprinting up an down. At 10:25 the High St was shut and we all then gathered by our respective speed groups. I was planning to beat 65 minutes, so it was discouraging to find the slowest time group was simply the “over 55 mins”. But I was from alone, and I landed up next to another first-timer — which was good until I realised she was wearing Lycra and surely was more serious about it all. It was curiously quiet waiting for the start, standing ten abreast, with a few brief sentences to be polite and ease tension. Then the signal to start and 700 of us began to jog an then run, now with only the sound of breath and footsteps.

My first mistake came at about 1km, when we ran past some tables with water bottles set out. I was a bit surprised, but grabbed one anyway, only a few seconds later realising that they were supposed to be for collection when we passed back the other way in about 4km time. I’d not run with a bottle before, and it wasn’t easy to hold or use. It stopped my thirst but it could have lost me some energy. Daft as I’d just bought an easy-to-hold runners bottle, but heeded advice not to use it for the first time in a race.

My other mistake was not having a basic watch on. I’m used to getting pace and distance info from my iPod, but headphones being banned that option was out. (Though a few flouted that rule.) So I was not sure what my time was until almost the end, when I heard the announcer urge finishers some distance in front of me to “sprint to beat the hour”. Despite finding km 8-9 hard work, I probably could have come in just under 60 mins if I’d pushed. I was still very pleased with my sub 10-minute mile average, and that I did it without stopping.

Will I do another one, or longer distances? I might manage a half marathon (about 20km) but at the moment I think I’d find the training just too dull. I get bored after about 40 mins even with interesting music an podcasts …

Perhaps the next challenge is to get Martha to join me. She used to be a very fast cross-country runner at school …

That’s the % of fat in the milk we’re now trying. And to be honest we can’t tell the difference. So depending on the dairy, we’ll now be mostly buying orange or purple milk, not green. I doubt it’s really going to make much health difference, but I suppose every little helps … ching ching …

It’ll be a long time before I achieve this again …

In my run tonight I went further than before (6.4km), with a longer workout time (40 mins), and managed a personal best for the mile (according to dear old Lance Armstrong).

This still isn’t much set alongside my marathon-running colleagues, but it’s now part of my training (ooo errr that sounds grand) for the Evesham Vale 10K I’m going to enter in mid-July. If anyone would like to know more, please get in touch … it’d be more fun to run it with some others.

I guess I need to think of a charity to collect for. Though really I’m doing it just as a personal goal.

It felt gooooood. I managed my longest run yet yesterday evening: 3.6 miles in 36 minutes. I got back early from work, and it was the first time it felt light and warm enough to make a run inviting. I headed up to the disused railway line, and got into the centre of town, before turning round. All in, I stopped only for a few moments at the point I turned round, which is far better than any other run this year. The last half mile felt particularly good, as I knew that I could make easily make it back, and I even picked up the pace a little.

This was more than 5km; if I can do it 4 times over, that’s a half marathon. Makes it feel more of a possibility …

Following up on my recent post about Paul McKenna’s diet, have you heard of flexitarianism? I hadn’t either. But that’s a name that’s being put to the idea that we’d be better off going veggie until supper. Perhaps the largest argument is for ecological reasons, to help reduce cattle-produced greenhouse gasses, which should help reduce global warming. And it may help our health, too. More people are suggesting that our bodies aren’t designed to process as much meat as rich Westerners tend to have, and that we should take more to the Oriental approach of meat once a day (or less).

Mark Bittman’s new book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating makes the case for this, and is apparently well worth the read.

I’d been meaning to find some more varied and healthier options for lunch than my usual high-carb meat sandwiches. This has prompted me to try having soups, noodles, and rice-based meals instead of those sandwiches. I went to the local Chinese supermarket to get some noodles, but I now realise I don’t have the facilities at work for cooking most of their noodles. Even finding a microwave is hard. Perhaps I should try to find healthy Pot Noodles, where you only need a kettle …

Martha watched Paul McKenna’s diet programme a few days ago, and was rather taken with it. No surprise: a diet where you can eat what you want, when you want. Quite what makes this a diet? Firstly stopping when you’re feel full – important if obvious. And secondly eating more consciously. Not eating in front of the TV or reading a book, but concentrating on the food, and the sensation of chewing the food fully. I certainly have tried to stop eating when full, though I now realise that’s harder when out visiting friends, or when watching TV. Looks like we need to get over the etiquette of clearing your plate when a guest, and take the Eastern model that it’s polite to leave a little, to show that they’ve been generous enough hosts.

It turns out to be a whole 6 weeks since I last went for a run, partly through illness, and partly because I’ve got out of the habit. It was getting on for freezing this morning, but I didn’t realise that until I’d got dressed for the run, so went ahead anyway. I was most surprised to hear at the end of the run Paula Radcliffe congratulating me on my fastest mile yet (oh, the marvels of iPod/Nike+). Perhaps it was the cold? Certainly can’t have been the practice …

In the last 6 months I have run 50 miles, in 7.5 hours. Not that much really, and it only lost me 4,500 calories. My average pace was 9 min 20 a mile — which is only a paltry 6.4 mph.

I hardly think this qualifies me to call myself a runner. I’ve not landed up being bitten by the bug, or entered races, or noticed a difference in my fitness level, but at least I’ve not injured myself. (Perhaps I’m lucky, as I don’t really understand what sort of warm-up and the all-important warm-down I should do.) But what does make a runner? If a writer is just someone who regularly writes — whatever the quantity or quality — then perhaps I am a runner. Perhaps I’ll settle for now to call myself an “intermittent jogger”.

What do you think makes a runner?