Douglas Ireland

Tag: fitness

  • I’ll start tomorrow

    Soundtrack to this post.

    About four months ago I was diagnosed with MS. I’m not going to write a big dramatic post about that part, not today anyway, but I’ll be honest about what it did to me in the short term. There was a bit of depression in there, the kind you don’t always admit to at the time, and I dealt with it the way a lot of people do. I ate. Chocolate mostly. Chocolate has always been my vice and for a few weeks it was more or less a food group.

    The problem is that I also have type 2 diabetes, so emotionally eating my way through bars of chocolate was about the worst thing I could be doing, MS or no MS. And I knew it. I knew I needed to eat better and move more. Every single day I told myself the same thing: I’ll start tomorrow. Tomorrow is a very comfortable place to keep your good intentions. Nothing ever actually has to happen there.

    Then about three weeks ago something just snapped in my head. I can’t point to a single moment or some big realisation. I just woke up done with waiting for tomorrow. I started counting my calories that same day and I joined the gym.

    If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ll know I care a lot about privacy, and about choosing what data I hand over to whom. So the obvious tools were out. I wasn’t about to feed every meal into MyFitnessPal or every run into Strava and let them quietly build a picture of my body and my habits. That’s just not for me.

    What I could do was self-host. I set up SparkyFitness for logging my food, which does much the same job as MyFitnessPal but on my own server with my own data staying mine. And I built myself a simple training log for the exercise side. I genuinely enjoyed building it, which is half the appeal. Both have public diaries if you fancy following along:

    [Edit: 20/07/2026] I wasn’t getting on with SparkyFitness. It was quite hard to use on mobile, hard to see, and had loads of features I didn’t use while missing some I wanted. So I made my own version that does exactly what I want with no bloat, called Nourish. The food log and training log are now merged into one at nourish.douglasireland.com/public/douglas-ireland. If you fancy trying Nourish and giving me feedback, it’s at nourish.douglasireland.com.

    On the running side I’ve started Couch to 5K again. If you’ve not come across it, it’s a beginners’ running plan (the NHS version is the one most people in the UK use) that eases you from not running at all up to running 5k. Three sessions a week over nine weeks, starting with short bursts of running in between walking and building up from there. I’m on week 3 as of today.

    To run the plan I use an app called Just Run, which I found on F-Droid. It fits the same rule as everything else here: no ads, no account, no tracking, just a timer that tells you when to run and when to walk. It’s made by a small developer called Jupli and it’s exactly the sort of quiet, does-one-thing-well app I like to give a shout to, so if you’re starting C25K yourself it’s well worth a look.

    Alongside the running I’m keeping my food to around 1800 calories a day.

    I won’t pretend three weeks is long enough to call anything a transformation. But I can honestly say I already feel amazing. Better than I have in a long time, and better than I expected to this soon. Ten years ago I could run a 5k in 23 minutes and I was sitting at a 22.4 BMI. That’s the version of me I’m aiming to get back to. Not to prove anything to anyone, just because I felt good back then and I’d like to feel that way again, MS and diabetes and all.

    If you want to keep an eye on how it’s going, the diaries above update as I do. No login, no tracking, just the numbers.

  • Running, Stopping, and Starting Again.

    I’ve completed the Couch to 5K programme twice before. It’s not magic, but it works. Each time I finished, I felt quietly pleased with myself. I’d reached a point where running 5 kilometres in around half an hour was comfortable. Not easy, exactly, but doable.

    I enjoyed it, too. Or at least, I enjoyed the feeling afterwards. A clear head, lungs awake, the simple satisfaction of having moved my body for half an hour. And yet, both times, gradually and predictably, my trainers ended up back in the cupboard. Days between runs turned into weeks. Motivation faded, routines slipped.

    I’m not running right now because of a back injury. But I’m hoping I’ll start again soon. My aim is simple: run 5K in about 30 minutes, three times a week. The NHS recommends at least 30 minutes of vigorous activity weekly, enough to break a sweat and get properly out of breath, and this ticks that box neatly.

    For anyone unfamiliar, the Couch to 5K (often shortened to C25K) is straightforward. You run three times each week, for nine weeks. Early on, it’s mostly walking, with short bursts of jogging. Over time, the jogging bits get longer, and the walks shorter, until you’re running continuously for half an hour or so. It’s structured, manageable, and it doesn’t assume you’re already fit.

    I’ve never struggled with completing the programme itself. It’s after finishing, once I’ve proven to myself that I can do it, that the difficulty begins. Without a schedule nudging me forward, I slip quietly back into the old routines of not running at all. Maybe the issue is that I think of myself as having ‘finished’ something. Perhaps running isn’t something that can be finished. It’s more of an ongoing conversation between motivation and habit, between intention and routine.

    This time, I wonder if acknowledging this up front might help. There’s no great secret to staying motivated. It’s probably about quiet acceptance that some days I won’t want to run at all. But maybe running anyway, gently defying the urge to stop, will help me find a sustainable rhythm.

    For now, my shoes are waiting. Soon enough, I hope, I’ll be lacing them up again.