“I didn’t have time.” “I had too much on.” “Something came up.” We’re all familiar with these excuses and I’m sure we’ve reached for more than one of them when justifying not running. But what if someone were to make the day longer. Well, someone has just bloody well gone and done that. My day is now 90 minutes longer leaving me bereft of excuses.

This weekend I moved flat and stopped being a hobo – though I haven’t stopped smelling like a hobo yet. I now live a whole lot closer to work which will save me a total of 90 minutes every weekday. My commute will now take between 5-10 minutes – that’s dependent on whether I stop at the shop or get distraced by a cute cat.

In 90 minutes I can pretty comfortably run 10 miles. I did it the other day and thought myself pretty badass. So, in theory, I could run 10 miles every day and still do all the things that I’d do if I didn’t run but lived in my old flat. But that’s not going to happen. I know exactly what’s going to happen.

I really only have 45 minutes extra in my day. The time saved in the morning is going to quickly be absorbed by getting up later. And this will swiftly be justified as being vital to the cause of the sub-4 marathon. As we all know, the tripple threat to marathon training and potential injury is dehydration, bad nutrition and lack of sleep. So just to be on the safe side I’ll be adding another 45 minutes to my shut-eye quota.

So in 45 minutes I can run 5 miles. A decent midweek distance for most. But lots of other things are 45 minutes long too. Like an episode of The Sopranos – the boxset of which is begging me to give it some attention. And besides, at 5pm it’s far too hot to go for a run – I should probably wait a couple of hours until it cools down a bit and there’s less people to get in my way.

So there you have it – a whole host of new excuses. I just had to try a little harder to look for them.