kate bush sux.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I cannot abide Kate Bush. Not at any price; not at all. To make it clear to the meanest intelligence, nothing would make me happier than seeing her locked in a sound-proof, airless room and slowly, quietly suffocated.

Also, all copies of her music should be destroyed along with any and all books, writing and photos. Any references to her and her music should be expunged from the permanent record and anyone who so much as thinks the words “Kate Bush” should be threatened with public horse-whipping.

Now, before you say anything, I know that’s possibly a bit over the top, and also probably doesn’t take into account the fact that her music is allegedly quite good and quite influential.

That’s not the point. This is:

• She has the most irritating voice ever
• She has the most irritating bug eyes ever
• She has the worst song ever (Wuthering Heights)
• She has the worst film clip of all time (see above)
• She is the worst dancer I’ve ever seen (see above)
• She seems to be proud of it

In general, she’s like Celine Dion on steroids. Just if you were wondering, that’s not a good thing in my book.

So, that being said, I can’t figure out why I like Tori Amos. It doesn’t make sense. Admittedly, I’m no fan of songs like Happy Phantom, but in general I like the cut of her jib.

In a similar sort of angsty, female, piano-playing vein, I’ve also have come to like Fiona Apple. I’ve only heard the album called “When the pawn…” but it’s quite good. I like the piano on “On the bound” and almost everything on “Fast as you can”. The lyrics are angry and angsty and generally pretty adolescent (“he don’t give a shit about me”) but quite good for all that.

Running
Yesterday was quite a down day, due mainly to lack of sleep. Today was much more positive. I was feeling pretty good, so swapped the scheduled “easy” session for some hills. It was around 10k, including 16 hills. I did the same course a few weeks ago and really had to work hard, but today I seemed to just float over the top of the hills. Perhaps I need a harder course next time.

This weekend’s weather forecast is looking a touch ominous. 38 on Sunday and Monday. I suspect the long run will have to be rescheduled for Saturday morning. I don’t have room in my busy schedule for heat stroke.

Otherwise, everything’s on schedule, marathon-wise.

Today, sometime half way up a hill, I passed 300k for the month. It’s the first time for me, as far as I’m aware. I’m feeling pretty good in general. Fighting fit, and raring to go.

can you buy endorphins?

Em over at Running all over the place has a special place on this blog. It’s over on the right and down a bit. She even merited a mention in the body of my post yesterday. Now, I don’t like to be seen to be criticising one of my blogging colleagues, but her post yesterday comes under the category of “cruel mockery”.

I felt so great after yesterday’s run, it was a great session and I was still buzzing today. Now if only I could figure out to bottle that I’d never have to work again 🙂

The post title is can you sell endorphins?

Yairs, well. If she’s selling, I’m buying.

This morning’s run was almost totally lacking in endorphins, or any other type of phins. It was a miserable experience, to tell the truth.

It was 12k, with the last 4k at a “steady” pace. I fell over the doorstep after an hour of dragging my sorry behind around the streets. Note the use of the words “fell”, “dragging” and “sorry behind”. I hope my choice of words gives you a hint of how I was feeling. I do try to use the mot juste wherever possible.

Anyway, I got home from my run and just felt like death. Not death-warmed-over. I didn’t have the energy for warming anything. Just death. And the worst thing was I have a very full day at work today. Great.

Am I sick? Nah, just tired. The smallest member of our house was a bit vocal last night. Very vocal.

Gosh I need some sleep.

too much running

I’ve been casting around for things to write about, now that I’ve sworn off all things public-transport. This blog has always been basically about running, hence the title, but I’m aware not everyone is as fascinated by LSD and fartlek as I. Therefore I try to add a little other stuff just to sweeten the pill, so to speak.

No need to thank me, it’s all part of the service.

So what are other people writing about? Here are some of my current non-running-related favourites:

What Ho Proles! “Being the diary of an English Tory Gentleman” – a lot better than it sounds
Richard Dawkins.net – the world’s most famous aetheist
Road to Surfdom – not (much) about surfing, lots of good stuff about politics etc.
Frankie Valley – not the 50s singer – a brilliant blog on Charlton Athletic. Comments and responses almost as good as the main blog. An absolute genius at winding up moronic English football fans, not that it’s all that hard really.

Some running sites:

Running all over the place – a strange attraction for Craig Mottram and various members of the New Zealand cricket team. More obsessed with running than me. Makes me feel lazy.
Tails from the trail – includes a tattoo removal section. Very helpful.

Running
A quick glance at my online training diary gizmo will show you a bit of difference between column C and E this last week. I’ve managed to stretch a planned 60k week into an actual 74k.

Mostly it was because I couldn’t find routes that went for exactly 10 or 8ks. Yesterday however, I just didn’t feel ready to stop at 20k. It was much more of a 30k day, perhaps more. The sun was shining, there was a lovely cool breeze and I set the mp3 player to shuffle and let it throw up a succession of great songs. A relatively slow pace, but perhaps marginally too fast for a standard LSD. 4.7 minutes per k.

An example – Berceause by Gabriel Faure, followed by Coffee and TV, by Blur. As a playlist, it works remarkably well.

Back to the running, I just don’t see the point in pulling back my training to match the program.

fast, slow, fast, slow

Trains have become a bit of an ongoing theme in this blog of late, particularly since the Middleborough road bypass kicked into gear about a month ago. Frankly, it’s becoming a bit of a bore. I’m sick of it, I can’t imagine how you must feel.

So today, one last blog on the subject and then that’s it. I’m going to let all my resentment and paranoia out in one nasty, foul stream.

Out of my system forever.

History
For those of you who weren’t around or weren’t paying attention, back in the 90s the Kennett government inherited a public transport system on a slow, steady decline into irrelevance. As was his way with most issues, Kennett decided to sack most people, put the fear of god into the rest and sell everything that wasn’t nailed down.

The theory being that business=good, government=bad.

The whole thing was arranged through what would now be called a Public-Private Partnership, or PPP. A PPP is a Blairite euphamism, which basically means a private company gets the profit, the government gets the risk and the taxpayers foot the bill when it all goes belly-up.

Which it did of course in the early part of this decade.

The whole competition thing never really worked, as if it ever could…. I never understood how one train company could compete with another for commuter traffic. You’re only going to take the first train that shows up that takes you home. No-one cares about the corporate logo or the ads on telly.

Anyway, the corporate lords and masters did what corporate lords and masters do best – go bankrupt and flee the country, leaving the Bracks government with a bit of a problem on their hands.

Bracks et al solved the problem with the brilliant insight that the private operator should never be allowed to go broke, no matter how badly they perform. Which brings us to where we are today.

The Department of Infrastructure, Connex, Yarra Trams and Metlink form a sort of unholy alliance. Where they meet is a black hole where, to mix a metaphor, good governance goes to die. Governance really isn’t the word – management isn’t either. Any suggestions?

Middleborough Road
When the news surfaced that the people above would be doing a project over summer to “fix” a traffic black-spot, the heart didn’t exactly leap with hope and excitement. It was fair to say I was a little pessimistic and this blog reflected that fact.

I could see a 6 week project stretching on for months.

To be fair, I’ve been proved wrong, spectacularly so. The 6 week project is almost over, and free coffee cards are being handed out like they’re going out of fashion.

So, has this black-hole of mismanagement actually delivered? Should I retire my cynical brain and trust them?

If only it was so simple.

The real story
Have you ever worked on a project at work? Well, if you have, then you should know everything always takes twice as long as your boss wants it to. If you’re smart you get around this by telling your boss it’ll take three times as long as he would like. Then no matter what happens, he’ll be happy.

That’s what Connex have done. The oldest trick in the book.

We’ve been had!

Oh well, it’s not so bad. I’ve been “had” far worse in the past. At least this time we’ve gotten a hole in the ground and a coffee card out of the deal.

Rant over. I promise never to mention it again.

Running
Just over 10k today including some fartlek, 6 efforts of about a minute interspersed with 2-3 minutes of recovery done at what my program calls “steady” pace. The way I’ve worked it out, the efforts are done at around 3:40 minutes/k and the recovery closer to 5min.

It probably would have been easier over flat terrain, but we’re not exactly blessed with flat surfaces in my area, and I refuse to run around the block 25 times. Ah well, whatever doesn’t kill me, blah, blah, blah.

upskirt

I don’t understand people, I really don’t.

First:

Three, count them, three people have been arrested for taking “upskirt” pictures at the tennis this year. See this story on the Age site. I don’t get it. What’s the attraction? What’s the point? Is this some new kind of trend I’ve missed out on?

God I hope “upskirt” doesn’t catch on as a new word, it’s almost as bad as “turkey-slapping”.

The sad thing is for every sicko who’s arrested there are another 10 who aren’t, and another 1500 who’ll pay to see the pictures on the internet.

Second:

A friend of mine was walking home to his place in St Kilda last week when 3 guys jumped him from behind and beat him up, really badly. He has no idea who they were or why they did it. He can only guess they assumed he was gay, as the park he was in is known as a gay area. He’s not gay, not that it makes any difference.

So now he’s battered and bruised, has 4 chipped teeth and has felt like crap ever since. What could possibly motivate anyone to do that?

Running
It’s day 3 of the training program, which means 10k “easy”. I’ve never liked the idea of easy runs, or recovery runs. I’ve always thought if you need to recover, don’t run. Also I struggle to tell exactly how easy I should go.

I tried it this morning, just trying to relax and spend some time looking at the scenery. Seeing as the scenery included Dorset Road Croydon and the Ringwood East IGA, it wasn’t entirely satisfactory. Nevermind, it’s another run down, and a tick in another box.

Training log
I’ve made some minor changes to the online spreadsheet, including setting it to refresh itself every 5 minutes. You can see it at Google spreadsheets.

Blogging
Blogspot seemed to completely freeze up and die this morning. I couldn’t even access it as a public user. (blogger techo people – it was a 502 error, if you’re reading this). The competition is looking better and better every day.

Day 2 – training log now online (ish)

I hate having to do this, but today’s post concerns things vaguely technomalogical. Why “hate”? Well, because I think of running as something completely simple and natural; even organic. It’s the most basic sport you can do, and should be kept so, in my opinion. I resent gadgets, machines and gear in general.

There’s a bit in The World According to Garp by John Irving, when Garp, who’s a distance runner himself, rejects all sports apart from running and wrestling. His theory was that every time you include an apparatus (ball, stick, bat, whatever) you corrupt the essence of the sport. Dodgy theory, I know. Also, I’m no fan of wrestling.

Anyway, that’s why I don’t do so much cycling any more. Bikes are beautiful machines, don’t get me wrong, I love all things carbon-fibre, but at the end of the day, they’re just “gear”. I don’t want to do a sport that requires “gear” and being a gear-head.

Anyway – the one sort of gear that is useful in running (apart from shoes) is a running log. Most people recommend keeping one, and I have in the past, especially when training for a specific race.

As I’m currently in Day 2 of my marathon program, I thought it would be worthwhile keeping one this year. And, seeing as this blog is nominally about running, I should be able to include it here.

Well, you’d think so. Sadly, it’s not that easy. My colleagues who’ve defected to wordpress are able to add extra pages. This would be ideal – I could just layout a basic html table, as per Jaykay’s beautiful example.

Blogspot doesn’t seem to like that idea, presumably on the basis that it would be a bit useful, so I have to look elsewhere.

Whaddaya know? Google, in their infinite wisdom have an online solution to my every problem. Bless ’em.

This time – it’s Google spreadsheets. Unfortunately, it’s unbelievably clunky and difficult to use, and up until recently, didn’t allow you to publish the spreadsheets anywhere. I don’t understand why you can only put in 100 rows. It’s clearly not enough. Combine that with the dreadful time-lag everytime you do anything, and it’s hardly worth persisting with.

I had little choice, so I’ve put together a simple spreadsheet, which you can see here at Google spreadsheets (opens in a new window). It will allegedly update itself every 5 minutes; completely pointless of course unless I decide to do a training run 480 times a day. Have a look if you like.

Yes, I know, it’s a crap spreadsheet. But consider what I had to work with, and the fact that it was done in about 10 frustrating minutes.

Day number 1

Well, that’s a bit of a relief. I’d been looking forward to this day with not a little dread, I must say.

What am I talking about? Oh, sorry about that, today is Day 1 of my Marathon training program.

Strangely enough – it starts with a “rest day”. That’s my sort of training. I’m well equiped to handle a rest day. I’ll just arse about here at work, go home have dinner and slob about in my tracky-dacks for the night.

Last night was a super-rest night. I had a nap from about 7:30 to 9 – the other half likes the tennis, which puts me to sleep at the best of times. I woke up for about 10 minutes to drag my sorry behind into bed and then slept from 9:15 right through to 6:30. It’s almost unheard of. I put it down to the unfamiliar sensations of rain on the roof and lying under the doona. Admittedly, yesterday was a fairly exhausting day – up at the crack of dawn to get out on the road. 26k later, I was at home ready to “start the day”, terrific.

This week’s training is relatively restful altogether. 60k, with 2 rest days and a couple of runs marked down as “easy”. This week might come under the category of “lulling into a false sense of security”. Looking a few pages into the program, I’ll be doing 100k weeks with strides, tempo, fartlek, hills, fartlek over hills and god-knows what else.

I’ve tried to get a bit organised. I now have a spreadsheet, which logs all my training for 2006. I’ll attempt to figure out a way to include it on this page, soonish.

nick cave and hills

After what has been a fairly eventful week, what with spectral apparitions, public-transport fuelled tirades and narrowly averted defamation cases, it’s time for something a bit more staid. This blog is getting a bit too much like an episode of Scooby-Doo, except without the dog, the girls and the drug references.

So on today’s agenda we find some thoughts on music and, shock-horror, running.

Music
I’ve been listening to a bit of Nick Cave again recently. There’s something about his music that makes the sight of hordes of teenage “heard” members in green and gold chinese hats less appalling.

In fact his music makes a lot of things seem less appalling. I’m beginning to think we, in Australia, don’t give him the credit he’s due.

In the broader scheme of things, he’s probably a minor figure at best, but in terms of Australian music he’s a colossus on our tower of song. (apologies to Leonard Cohen). He’s one of the few songwriters I can think of who haven’t burned out or faded away, but actually become better as he got older.

Listen, if you can, to this sequence of songs:

Watching Alice > The ship song > Sweetheart come > Babe you turn me on.

His early heroin-addled, sub-William Faulkner schtick has deepened and shifted focus. In the process his voice, songwriting and general persona has become so much better.

In a way the list of songs above isn’t that great an example. Watching Alice is a beautiful, disturbing song, but the singing is a joke. Babe you turn me on is delivered wonderfully, but it has some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard, Pussycat Dolls included.

Now, the nightingale sings to you
And raises up the ante
I put one hand on your round ripe heart
And the other down your panties

I mean really, what was he thinking? If you listen carefully, he kinda pauses before the line about panties, as if he’s thinking “I can’t believe I’m going to say this”.

Then again, Sweetheart Come is one of my favourite songs. I was listening to it on the train this morning, and god it’s beautiful. I know exactly how it feels to be in that situation, and I love the way he says “I love you without measure” almost as an aside.

Come over here babe it ain’t that bad.
I don’t claim to understand the troubles that you’ve had.
But the dogs you say they’ve led you to
lay their muzzles in your lap.
The lions that they fed you to
lie down and take a nap.
All the ones you fear are wind and air
and I love you without measure.
It seems we can be happy now,
better late than never.

Running
I attempted a hill training session today, as these seem to crop up alarmingly often in the marathon training plan I start next week. I did 4 laps of a section of road near my place in Ringwood East. Each lap goes for just under 2k and has 4 ups and 4 downs. I wanted to do it seriously, so I made sure I worked hard going up, and continued working until I got well over the crest of the hill. Then on the down bits I jogged a bit slower.

16 hills all up, plus 2km warmup and another 2km cool down. So all up it was about 11km. What with the humidity, the hard work and the little spots of rain that were starting I was dripping wet by the time I got home. I think I scared small animals and children.