april fool

It’s not actually April yet, despite what Em would have you believe.

But it IS more than 10 days since last I wrote.

If you know me at all well, you’ll know I never go that long without posting unless I’m in a major grump. Well…. I’ve been in a major grump.

To be precise, I’ve been sick. The world’s worst man-flu, that laid me pretty much horizontal for 5 days. 5 days spent watching the world’s largest collection of James Bond DVDs and calling feebly for Panadol and chicken soup.

That finished last Thursday, but it wasn’t until Sunday that I felt well enough to run. Even then, I probably shouldn’t have.

Today I had a more decent 12.5km run and tomorrow there’ll be another.

It’s all been terribly depressing. I now feel weak and unfit, like I’ve lost all the work I did up to now and am starting marathon training from scratch.

I did consider, in a fit of pique, pulling out of Gold Coast altogether. I’d also consider bailing on the Run for the Kids, except I want to try out the new Racer shoes.

Ahh well, it will pass. It hasn’t killed me, so I guess I must be stronger.

seeing eye to eye

My legs and I often disagree, most notably when I thought it’d be a good idea to run 30km up at Maroondah Dam in 2008. My legs, sensibly, thought I’d lost the plot and refused to go ahead with it.

I don’t blame them. If I were them, I’d be extremely wary of me at the best of times. I’m liable to take them out in all weather and, without warning, insist they run for two hours without stopping.

But today, this morning, my legs and I were of one mind. We were both tired.

Last night I fell asleep on the couch, about half way through Law and Order. I remember some poor woman being beaten up by her husband, the cops were helping out, then some glamourous ADA got involved, but after then: sweet oblivion.

The SW lasted right through to 5am, when my blasted body clock woke me up. I was still exhausted, and my legs had hot molten lead flowing through every vein. Not nice.

The 5am run was cancelled.

I did run later on – about 7:30 in the city, but it was a near run thing. In fact, the whole run was completed solely on will-power (sheer bloody-mindedness).

It wasn’t my greatest run – 13km in an hour, but it did include 6 reps of the Anderson Street hill. I’m happy I did it, or rather, I’m happy it’s done.

Tomorrow’s a day off.

nitwitter

If you’re lucky enough to have met me in the flesh, you’ll know I’m something of an introvert. Indeed, if you look up “introvert” in the dictionary, the only reason you won’t see a picture of me is because I refused to have my picture taken.

Introverts, if you didn’t know, are nice people who like to quietly think nice quiet thoughts and only speak when we’re pretty sure we’ve properly considered the question. If that happens to be 10 years later, well, so be it. At least you know if we say something we mean it.

All of this makes me a poor candidate for blogging. Hesitate, meditate, consider for an instant and your blogging moment is gone, the zeitgest has passed.

And Twitter is even worse. Twitter is like blogging, except without all the fine crafting. What you have instead is 140 character “tweats” telling anyone who’ll listen what you’re thinking at any one moment. Kevin Rudd is a very kean twitterer (and possibly twit). I signed up to his feed, and he’s on there about 35 times a day. This suggest to me an extreme case of verbal diarrhea and/or a hard-working publicity team.

I work with websites, so in the interests of professional research, I signed up yesterday, and had a play with it, getting the mobile to work and using the rather cute looking website.

Anyway, it you’re a fellow twitterer (twit?) you can now sign up to “follow” me. Just search for “henderson” and look for a familar photo.

I’ll give you a free sample, for nothing:

1:19 Writing my blog, but hope I look like I’m working… https://jruns.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/nitwitnitwit/

Fascinating eh?

Running
Awake well before the birds this morning and out for the mid-week long run. 17.4km of hilly terrain, including a couple of nasty ones on Cantebury road. I finished in 1 hour 18, which shows you how hilly it was.

It was still dark. Depressing. When are they going to stop this stoopid daylight savings thing?

dora tarted up

I don’t know if you spend much time with kids toys these days. I do, owing to having two very small kids.

They (the kids) seem to pick up, almost by osmosis, a million different bits of advertising. My two year old loves Thomas the tank engine, Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam, the Wiggles, Playschool, Little Red Tractor, Sesame Street, Postman Pat, and absolutely anything to do with trains, dinosaurs and (strangely) ballet.

Most of this makes me grumble and grind my teeth grumpily. Most kids stuff seems designed solely to teach kids how to pester their poor parents to buy more DVDs and crappy toys.

And the girls’ stuff seems to be pretty retrograde. Barbie, the Bratz and all the other things seem to prepare girls for a life of vapid Paris Hilton-ness.

Dora the Explorer, is a bit of an exception. She’s ordinary looking, if not plain, with a simple bob haircut and a basic outfit of t-shirt, shorts and sneakers: ie. the stuff you might wear if you were out playing. She also has brains and confidence.

So, it’s a bit of a worry to see they’re giving her “a makeover”.

She’s now a “tween”, with a pink dress, pretty shoes, jewellery and pierced ears. Why? Well, I know why. But I don’t like it.

If you don’t like it, there’s an online petition to fill out here: www.ipetitions.com/petition/Dora_Makeover.

Running
I was sick yesterday, but feeling good today. A couple of laps of the tan this morning.

bloody football

There are some things I will never understand about this city (Melbourne). Chief amongst them is football. Don’t get me wrong, I like the AFL. It’s not a bad game to watch and I can see the players are impressive athletes. But they’re not that good.

On my way to the train station I pass a little newspaper stall, and they usually have a sign up showing the top story from the Herald Sun. This morning it was “Revealed: Sheehan’s top 50”.

Revealed?

“Sheehan” is (I learnt this subsequently) a football journalist, meaning he gets paid to sit around watching football and write about it. Apparently, he’s sat around, presumably over a few beers, and worked out his top 50 players.

And this is news.

Not only that, it’s a revelation.

Running
A recovery run this lunch-time. There was a little bit of stiffness early on, but I started to feel good the second time around the tan. 12.5km in 55 minutes.

racer

The early-stages of marathon training are pretty good so far. I ran 80km this week, including 29km this morning. The run was fine, at a steady easy pace and I upped the pace over the last 3km. 29km in 2 hours 15.

That’s fine. No pressure. I kinda followed my nose a bit, and ended up running down Mountain Highway for long periods of time, instead of the usual trek up and down the Dandenong Creek Trail. I’d like to be doing these sorts of runs a bit fast in a month or two, when my fitness picks up a bit.

Shoes
This afternoon I happened to be in Smith street, in Collingwood, AKA cheap running shoes-town. Nike was a heaving mass of humanity – not much fun with little kids in tow. Brooks was far more civilised. Also, they had a pair of Racers going cheap in my size.

They’re not the most recent model, but I’m quite happy to be behind the fashions in these things. With any luck I can do a fast 10km or two. I’m thinking about running a marathon in them, but not quite convinced. Here’s a picture of them.

As Steve would say, that’s all.

that can’t be right

I woke up ridiculously early this morning, as is my wont, and headed out for a run. These early runs have their good points, in a “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” type way, but they’re not a lot of fun. They also don’t tend to results in terribly fast times – I find it takes me 20 minutes for the legs to warm up and 40 minutes for the brain to kick into gear.

So anyway, a run at 5am this morning, and not even an easy run. I did my little hill rep session, plus warm up, cool down and 6 strides at the end. It worked out to be 13.55km.

The funny thing is, my stopwatch said 51 minutes. That can’t be right!

I do not run that fast at 5am, up hills. It doesn’t happen. I think we’ll file this under “defective equipment”.

stack

There are many things to be said for running at 5am in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, but abundant natural light is not one of them.

It’s as dark as Phillip Ruddock’s soul out there. It’s also not terribly flat. The footpaths are amusingly riddled with rippled and bumps and abrupt changes of direction. Can you guess what happened this morning?

That’s right: a stack. I came a cropper and/or went arse over tit in dramatic fashion.

Thankfully, due to the aforesaid lack of street-lighting, I’m pretty sure no-one noticed. Also, due to my natural agility and cat-like grace, I managed to avoid serious injury.

Running
12.5km this morning in 54 minutes, plus about 2 metres flying forward, an inelegant barrel roll and a fountain of four-letter words.