The bootcamp instructor I spend my time with on Saturday mornings persists in jogging lightly along beside me while denigrating my running style. Probably with good reason. “Keep plodding along!” she shouts at me cheerily, while I gasp for air, and try and communicate with my eyes that I am not plodding, I am gliding, is she blind?

I am a terrible runner, and I haven’t done any regular running for a long time. When I was on my last fitness kick, I eventually worked up to being able to jog for 5ks without stopping. Once I was able to do that I apparently decided that I had ticked running off some invisible list, because I promptly stopped and did away with all the work it had taken to get there.

It took me 38 minutes to jog 5ks, with a couple of walking breaks, listening to a podcast and wearing my very attractive reflective ankle straps. The route I take starts on a downhill slope, which is a bit of a cheat I suppose, except that I have to run uphill on the way back. The moon hadn’t risen tonight when I was out, so I went fairly slowly along the road, only veering off the bitumen when a car came along. A guy on a horse came past and startled me when he said hello – I hadn’t noticed him until I was right next to the horse (well, it wasn’t wearing attractive reflective straps, after all).

There’s a fire burning somewhere tonight – the glow of it was reflecting orange off the clouds and there was a strong smell of smoke. Those glowing clouds are always a nasty sight to see on the horizon when you’re driving home at night, and you live surrounded by dry eucalypt forest – you do pointless mental calculations trying to figure out whether you’re driving towards it and how far away it is. This fire still seems to be a fair way off – I’m going to be optimistic and presume it’s some sort of official burning off, rather than something more worrisome.