After a Christmas period of heavy feasting, heavy drinking, heavy socialising and heavy not-exercising it’s time to get back to it. Both in terms of diet and fitness!

We’re on the road to the Kraków marathon on April 26th down in Southern Poland. It’s really not that far away and knowing training like we do it’ll soon fly by. This means it’s time to get back into training and time to refocus. It’s something we’re both super excited to do and hopefully share with you.

There are three core areas we’re working on post-festive season:,

• Diet, we eat really quite well normally but we’re focussing more on improving our wholefoods and reducing alcohol.
• Training, getting back into the structured training to make sure we’re prepped for our seasons.
• Yoga, this we’re approaching for two reasons, firstly the strength and mobility benefits that hopefully will help us stave off injury but importantly the ability to connect with ourselves, building awareness and helping to develop other skills.

The diet is a big one and probably the main focus for most people as the new year ticks around. It’s always been important for us and being plant-based we do tend to take a lot more care over what we eat than we did before. We’re going to try and reduce the amount of processed food, as there’s plenty of junk food available, even out here in rural Poland, and we eat a little bit too much of it!

We’re also trying to reduce the amount of sugar and alcohol that we have day-to-day. This one should be a little easier. Just bake fewer treats and therefore have less to eat! We’re also going back to a rule we had over the summer. If you want a treat, you have to earn it. That means a workout needs to be done first. It worked really well for us last year, so it’s back!

So what do the training plans look like? Well with our differing needs they’re understandably not the same.

Gabby, having already completed a marathon and looking to try and push on will be using a slightly tougher variant of the same training plan. It came from the Warsaw Marathon web page and it worked really well. Gabby’s already identified a few areas where she could improve from last time out (doing the strength work and consistency with some of the mid-week workouts).

With Liam and his ongoing knee struggle following the Lament back in November last year, he’ll be doing a much lighter program (a just finish one). Both programmes have fairly similar long runs so we’ll be able to do our weekend runs together.

Liam’s going to have more cross-training in his, mostly on the bike, to try and build some aerobic fitness minus the pounding on the joints. Having the blend will hopefully mean that once Triathlon season starts it won’t take so much to catch up to the run with the bike.

At the same time, we’ve both made a commitment to start yoga (for probably the 50th time). This time we’re working through the Yoga with Adriene 30 day challenge that started at the beginning of January. We’re onto day 8 as of writing and we’re both already seeing an improvement. The improvement though isn’t just physical, there’s definitely an upside.

We’re also thinking of logging this in a little more detail, maybe in the form of a weekly update, keep your eyes peeled!