Made it to the last day of the challenge. It's been an enjoyable week. I've not been finding it easy to find things to write about but I am proud at having managed it. I think I will try to continue for as long as I can.

I ran again this morning having taken a rest day yesterday. Pleasantly the weather had improved and it was much warmer than the near-zero temperatures I experienced the last time I was out. I feel that I'm getting back into a groove with it and my times have subtly, but steadily improved over the course of the week.

Related to running, I made a useful discovery that Garmin Connect, the web application that supports my GPS has, at some point in the last couple of years, gained the ability to synchronise with Runkeeper. I use both of these tools for a couple of reasons - partly because when I started running initially I was tracking my runs using a smartphone and used Runkeeper to do that, and partly to keep my data in more than one place to mitigate the risk that one of the applications might go away of lose data.

Up until now I'd been making use of a third-party application to pull the log files from my watch and upload them to Runkeeper in a manual process separate from Garmin's automatic synchronisation to Garmin Connect. I'd been struggling to get the site to work properly having made a recent switch from Firefox to Safari as my day to day browser and this led be to discover that this proccess was no longer necessary. Having authorised the connection between the two web applications the synchronisation process happens almost immediately after I connect the watch to my computer.

The outside world continues to be alarming, a situation that I don't imagine will improve in the next six weeks before the election or really any time soon. Despite all the rhetoric about 'control' over the last couple of years it feels to me that there is an utter absence of it, and we have politicians doing what the have the ability to do with little regard for whether what they are doing is going to be good for the country as a whole in the long, or even short, term.

I'm doing my best to stay positive, but I'm increasingly feeling the urge to keep my head down and my friends close in whatever ways I can.

Had a bit of a panic with these writings yesterday as I somehow managed to end up with an empty file in place of what I'd written on day 5. Fortunately after a lot of head scratching and fiddling around with git and Time Machine in the hope of recovering it I noticed that it was still present, unsaved, in a tab in my editor. Phew. I gather that there are a couple of extensions for Atom to autosave work-in-progress so I'll be exploring those soon.

(500 words) 2017-04-20 0815