mental vigour

***Newsflash****

Grant Hackett
My blogging fingers have been itching, reading about Grant Hackett’s hissy fit.

The jist of it, and correct me if I’m wrong, is he expected to win the 400 and 800 metres, despite not training as well as he usually does, because, well, he’s Grant Hackett “weetbix man” (or is it nutrigrain?). So now he’s going to:

..leave it right up until the actual swim and see how I feel

So he’s going to have a very public temper tantrum/drama-queen moment, and everyone else is supposed to wait until the last minute, presumably crossing our fingers and praying to the heavens that he deigns to pull on the togs.

Get over yourself, Grant. I don’t care. Bloody swimmers, they’re worse than tennis players.

We now return you to regularly scheduled blogging……

People who know me say (and I hear this a lot) that I’m a pretty bright, switched-on kinda guy. A mind like a steel er, what’s the word? This morning, the word is probably “sieve”. Yep, “sieve” is it – it lets an awful lot of stuff go through to the keeper, to mix a metaphor well and truly.

What am I on about? Oh, sorry, I’m dithering again.

Yesterday I lovingly hand-crafted, or rather burnt, a CD full of pictures to send in the post to my Dad. This morning I set out for work clutching the CD in a stamped addressed envelope intending to drop it in the post-box on the way to the station.

Well I dropped it in the box all-right. A big box with a hole in the top. But it wasn’t the post-box, it was the bin.

So Dad won’t get his pictures, at least not today. Sorry Dad, if you’re reading.

On the plus side, I’m sure the rubbish-men will enjoy pictures of my wedding. Also the post-men will enjoy reading 3-day-old copies of the herald sun.

Running
I passed someone who very strongly resembled Em, bounding along like a cheetah in human form under the Swan street bridge along the Yarra. I assume it was Em, if not it was someone who didn’t object to being called “Emma”.

At that stage I was feeling pretty chipper too. 2 laps of the tan later, one fast (no, really) and one including 6 Anderson street reps, the chipperness index had dropped rapidly. I decided to take the long way back to work, via Swanston street, just to make sure the distance was above 12k.

Program
I’m up to 366k for March so far. A 400k month is tantalisingly close. I’m sorely tempted to get out for a lazy 34k run tonight. Whaddaya think? An ideal Run for the kids warmup run, methinks.

homeland security

I have a new theory and I think it’s a winner. I think if I have more than 2 hours sleep in a row overnight I might feel better during my daily run. I’m going to test it out today.

Hey, it’s radical, but it just might be crazy enough to work. It can’t be worse than yesterday, when I was having cold sweats on the train into work, and pretty much fell asleep at my desk before lunch-time.

Instead of getting up at the crack of 5am this morning, I slept in. Instead I’m going to set out from work in about 90 minutes time and do a gentle stroll around the tan once or twice.

Running
So no running today, at least not yet. The program, whose word is law to me, insists today is the day for a tempo session, followed by hills. It seems a bit crazy to me, but who am I to argue. Like I said before, what the program wants, the program gets.

Kiddies
Who would have thought making disparaging remarks about sick kids would offend people? People are so over sensitive…. Sick kids themselves have much thicker skins. Well, most of them do.

Avatar
I have a new avatar, which appears as if by magic whenever I dispense my pearls of wisdom on the Ausrun and Coolrunning forums. Here it is:
It’s very humourous, no? It’s one of those safety pictures put out by the US Department of Homeland Security, presumably to warn you not to light cigarettes after eating beans. Ah, I love a good fart joke.

run from the kids

This morning’s run started sluggish and finished sluggish. Sadly, those were the good bits.

Yes, a very ordinary run all round. 18.9k of ordinariness run at a very ordinary 5.2m/k pace. I’d far prefer to just forget it ever happened, but I now feel completely, wait for it, ordinary. Tired, stiff, seriously hanging out for lunch and/or the end of the working day.

Oh well, I suppose I was due for a bad-un after weeks of relatively stellar performances. I suppose it’s good luck to have a bad run just before a race. Which brings me to….

Run for the kids
Call me churlish and mean, but I resent charity things like this. “Run for the kids”? Which kids? My kids? The private school kids who take up all the space on the train? And, assuming I enter this event, what exactly is my running going to do for them?

That being said, I did enter again this year. I ran last year in 59 minutes, from memory, and had a good time aside from the farce of a baggage drop and the irritating announcer trying to gee us all up. I also had to elbow passed about 300 snail-pacers at the start and perform advanced gymnastic maneuvers over traffic islands in the middle of Footscray road.

This year the course is backwards and, irritatingly, 500 metres longer. It means I won’t be able to beat my PB for 14.7k, which I’ve been looking forward to.

Mysteriously the course seems to have gotten shorter in the last couple of days. See the coursemap from the RFTK site. Someone’s obviously decided the front end of the casino is more scenic than the arse-end. It’s debatable, folks, very debatable. At least the new version cuts out the bit of Queensbridge street, which tends to be a bit of a wind tunnel.

So anyway, I’ll be there. I’ll be in black shorts and singlet, with yellow-ish Brooks shoes. Look out for me. I’m sure I’ll stand out in the crowd of 26,000.

now I’ve gone and done it

Back in October 2005, about 37ks into my one and only marathon, I remember quite clearly saying to myself:

Well, this was a bit of a mistake. I’m never doing this again

That would have been about 5 minutes after the point of complete exhaustion and 5 minutes before a date with the fearsome “wall”.

If you ever needed proof that I never learn, you have it now: I’ve just gone and entered a marathon. The Sri Chinmoy Williamstown marathon, to be precise. At Williamstown, naturally enough, on May 27th.

In my defence, I have almost 2 more years of solid running under my belt now, and almost double the training (in both quality and quantity) I did for my first effort. So, in theory, this one should be a breeze.

In theory…..

But now I’ve paid my money, there’s no backing out. Oh dear….

Running
13k this morning including 2 laps of Princess Park doing “anaerobic threshold” stuff, whatever that means.

Scales
I very rarely weigh myself, but I did on last weekend. It seems I’ve lost 2.8 kilos since new years eve. No big deal, I kind of expected to lose a little weight, due to giving up alcohol and significantly increasing the running.

running gods and bloody dogs

Sleep, or rather lack of sleep, has been a bit of an issue for me in recent weeks, for reasons I won’t go into in this particular forum.

I remember, way back in the dim, distant past, sleeping in until 1pm quite regularly. I remember at one stage complaining about having to start uni at 2:30 in the afternoon. It seemed pretty harsh at the time.

Ah, those were the days.

If you get to sleep in, congratulations, but I don’t want to hear it right now. I resent the thought that at this exact moment, thousands of slackers are wallowing in hoggish slumber, while I sweat away at the old computer like some sad-arse wage slave.

Anyway, this weekend passed saw a vary rare conjunction of events, where the weather, sleep, food and everything else provided by the running gods came together to form IDEAL running conditions.

Running
Saturday was pretty wet (hallelujah!) but luckily all that was required was 8k plus some downhill strides. 8k is almost exactly the distance to the mother-in-law’s joint, so off I toodled. I was wearing the old shoes, which are definitely starting to bother me, time to do something about that.

I had good fun at the end doing 6 downhill strides, winding up an increasingly aggro dog towards the end of each stride. Everytime I went passed he got more angry. Ha, ha, ha. More on dogs later…

Sunday wasn’t so wet, but a stunningly beautiful morning all round. I set out about 7 and did a modified version of the 31k route the ESRG did a few weeks ago. I forgot the vaseline, which is usually a recipe for disaster. However, as mentioned above, the running gods were clearly smiling on me. No blood, no tears, just a small ocean’s worth of sweat.

It was 36k all up, done in 2 hours 50 minutes. I was pretty happy with this, given I was alone and it was a touch hilly in spots. Also I managed to do the last 20 minutes at a faster pace, as per the program’s instructions.

If I had have continued at that pace, I would have done the marathon in 3 hrs 20, which I would be relatively happy with. Secretly, I’m hoping I can do it a bit faster, but we’ll see. Still 9 weeks of training to go.

Today I was up with the roosters and other wildlife for a 12k easy/recovery run. Luckily there wasn’t too much pain or stiffness.

So a pretty good running weekend all-round.

Bloody dogs
Dogs, they irk me. Actually it’s not so much the dogs as the owners. Specifically the kind of dog owners who allow great big vicious looking beasts to run off the lead in areas they shouldn’t. Also dog owners who have yappy-type dogs that jump out at you as you’re passing, forcing you to engage in evasive maneuvers and almost twisting your ankle to bejeezus. Bloody, bloody….

new shoes

Don’t get excited. I don’t actually have new shoes, but I am in the market for some.

It occurred to me yesterday that my old shoes have about 1300k on them. That’s probably about 500k too much. What’s 500k between friends you ask? Not much, I agree, but they’re Brooks Adrenalines which don’t have the best cushioning to start with. They’re now a little bit like running on little concrete slabs.

So, I took a bit of a walk around the city’s fine running emporia to see what the go is. I tried on a few pairs, and scoped things out.

Amusing comment overheard from a Rebel Sport salesman (“salesboy” really, he looked way young). “Oh, don’t worry, Brooks make the cushioning to outlast the shoes themselves”. Given my experience with my blue adrenalines GTS6, I admit to stifling a stealthy giggle.

No actual running today, rather a well-needed rest. As always, I feel slightly anxious not running. My problem – I need to learn to be less obsessive.

fartlek and diseased imaginations

Running
A nice, sharpish 10k this morning, including a fartlek session on rolling hills.

2 times 60 secs, with 60 sec float
4 times 30 secs, with 30 sec float
2 times 60 secs, with 60 sec float
4 times 30 secs, with 30 sec float
2 times 60 secs, with 60 sec float
plus warmup and the trip home.

A variety of steep-ish hills and more gentle slopes. The whole 10k took around 44 minutes, so it was a pretty hard workout.

I’m not entirely confident in the measurements though, as I had to time it using my watch and hope I went under a streetlight at the right time. In the end, I gave up measuring the time, and just counted out the time aloud, adding an extra 10 “seconds” at the end of each rep, just to be sure.

Because, AGAIN, it was dark for the entire morning run. God I can’t wait until daylight savings ends!!!!

Scary stuff
Which brings me nicely to Em, who wanted to know yesterday if I got spooked running in the dark foggy mornings.

Generally no, I don’t.

But yesterday, I was on the Dandenong Creek Trail, about 1500 metres east of Wantirna road in a fairly tree-ligned bit, when I could have sworn I heard footsteps behind me.

And there was no-one there. True.

I swung around to look, naturally, but there’s something about a torch shining through thick fog at night that does nothing for the nerves. In the end I just kicked my rational, aetheist’s brain back into gear and trotted along happily enough.

Em also had a particularly tasteless observation about Flat Daddies – that kids could break out the scissors and chop bits off if the real Dad stepped on a land-mine or similar.

I see your bad taste and raise you one disease imagination – what do the kids do if Daddy visits a Baghdad brothel?

sleep-running and flat daddies

There’s been a bit of comment around the traps recently about this:

Flat daddies

It’s a semi-federally funded US program that provides full-size printed posters of parents who are serving overseas in the US military. I guess they’re supposed to be some sort of substitute (although the website doesn’t use that word) for the real thing.

There’s something almost comical about the idea, especially the photo of the cutout sitting on the back seat of the car. It’s deluded, ridiculous. It’s almost enough to laugh, but in only in the way that you sometimes have to laugh at something really awful.

And it is really awful, the damage war does to people and families and ordinary lives. Imagine what those poor kids must be feeling at the moment.

Running
A mid-week long run this morning, again starting and finishing in darkness. I did 16k including around 8k on the pitch-black Dandenong Creek trail.

I had my head-lamp for illumination, but it was still a bit eerie. There was fog, and strange shapes looming up at me everywhere. What’s more, I didn’t see a soul until I reached Wantirna road and headed for home.

As for the running itself – there wasn’t much to tell. Bog-standard 5 minute ks; predictable, unchallenging. That being said, I think I was at least 45% asleep for most of it, so who knows?

Tomorrow, some fartlek to spice things up a bit.