My Strava Year in Sport stats dropped on Sunday morning. These are always HYPED up. Strava wants to dish out the love and get you to keep your subscription for another year.
I was expecting a poor performance for 2023. It’s been a year of getting inked up with the enforced breaks that follow. Plus the minor issue of an operation late in the year.
No surprises to see that cycling was my main activity. I wasn’t expecting to see walking ahead of running however.
Strava took great joy in telling me that I was in the top 2% of athletes on the platform. I countered this by considering that there are probably hundreds of thousands of people signed up who don’t even open the app.
I had 279 active days. I’m happy with that. I travelled in total just over 5,100km. Most of these seemed to be back and forth between Sunny Stockwell and LS.
I kept the active theme going for Sunday with a major garden hack. I wasn’t vain enough to Strava this. I did clock up 10k steps though.
The garden has been neglected for two months post-op. It shows it.
The first task was to scoop up the leaves from outside the front of the house. A few minutes in and I smelt dog shit.
Oh dear.
Thankfully I was wearing some Lidl gardening gloves. I paused for a moment, pondering what the Coffee Ponce of SW8 would have made of the situation.
The main task was to prune the wisteria for another season. I look forward to this - and also dread it - in equal measures.
It’s a major task. You’re left with a very satisfying feeling when it’s cut back and looks neat and tidy.
The Essex Elephant Feet also took a serious hacking. These are resilient little buggers. No matter how harsh I treat them, they always seem to deliver.
It was mild outdoors. A lone bumble bee was looking for a pollen filling station. Good luck with that in mid-December, fella.
The hack took six hours in total. I timed it to perfection, finishing as the sun was starting to set.
Liverpool Vs Man Utd almost sent me to sleep.
We had plans to head down to the Quay for the annual Carol Service.
DARTS got the better of us.