There’s no fool like Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson must wake up every morning and thank god for Tom Cruise.

Ask anyone, particularly Em, and they’ll tell you they absolutely HATE Tom C. He’s an ageing, arrogant movie star with seriously weird religious beliefs, funny ideas about psychiatry, too much money and, despite forcing his brain-washed wife to wear flat shoes and hunch over in public, is universally known as a short arse.

Tom C is so widely and loudly despised that Mel Gibson’s little…. pecadillos?… can almost slide under the radar, as much as an international movie star can.

But let’s have a look at Master Gibson.

He’s a Catholic, but of a loopy sect so conservative they to think everything after the Council of Nicea was politically correct interfering in the ways of the true church.

He makes movies in Aramaic, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that they make more sense than any of the Lethal Weapon films. Despite the religiosity, he thinks it’s okay to call female police officers “sugar tits” and rant about the Jews controlling the earth.

He’s also on record as saying his wife will not be “saved” as she’s an Episcopalian. In Mel’s world, God takes great notice of doctrinal differences.

Which brings me to this latest incident. His wife is divorcing him: possibly the bit about going to hell was the last straw. They don’t have a prenup, so he’ll probably be out of pocket by around $600 million bucks.

Now he’s been photographed in public with a Russian model – Oksana. Putting 2 and 2 together, it looks like the world’s most expensive root. I hope she makes him happy.

I do hope when I get to his age I don’t blow half my fortune (ha!) chasing after Russian models half my age. I might just stick to buying a motorbike.

I like it cold

There may be something in the air at the moment. I’m not sure what it is – certainly not heat – but it’s definitely doing something for my running.

I ran 32.5km on Saturday and actually really enjoyed it.

On Monday I ran for 14.4km, yesterday 12.5km and 13.4km this lunch-time. Here’s today’s route on mapmyrun.com.

What’s more, I’m actually looking forward to running. I wake in the morning, thinking about possible routes, and whether I can squeeze in an extra couple of ks before work.

It makes a change from normal marathon training, which is often a bit of a slog.

chucking out dead shoes

There’s a definite life cycle when it comes to running shoes, at least for me.

It goes something like this:

1. Shoe comes out in the US – becomes object of lust, possibly unattainable
2. Shoe comes out in Australia – I begin to haunt Rebel Sports
3. I come into money, or the old shoes fall apart – they are mine!
4. Too nice to take out of the box
5. First few runs – avoid taking them anywhere there might be water, mud, dust or muggers: in short, anywhere
6. Preferred option – run in them whenever I can
7. Dependable – the default shoe
8. A little tired, but still good
9. Very comfortable, but seen better days
10. First foot pain on long run – ignore it
11. More foot pain – can’t ignore
12. Move to cupboard – use for short runs
13. Move to other cupboard – for messing around the house

I can get that far pretty well, but there’s one last step I can’t take, namely:

• Put it in the bin

The affect of all that is I end up with cupboards full of old running shoes, lending a peculiar “fragrance” to the house.

There have been complaints.

So, last weekend I bit the bullet and chucked a few out. I now own:

1. 2 pairs of actively used Brooks Adrenalines – 1 for home and one for work
2. 1 pair of Brooks Racers
3. 1 pair of Brooks Adrenalines for messing around the house

And that’s it! I had to be cruel and lose, by my calculations, something around 5,000km worth of shoes.

Running
A 14.1km run this lunch-time in the cold. It felt good, like I was running well and fast. Not particularly quick though. 1 hour 5 minutes.

fun weekend

Apologies for the more than slightly sarcastic post title there.

It’s been cold, wet, windy and generally wintry here in Melbourne, which never really boosts the joie de vivre. Driving all over town looking at car yards doesn’t help either. For some reason, the entire car sales industry of Melbourne has taken the weekend off too, which makes it double irritating.

It’s one thing to have to stand around kicking tyres and making conversations with slimy crooks, it’s even worse when the slimy c’s don’t even bother to show up.

Anyway, we have our eyes on a car to replace the one lost in last week’s spider/tree incident.

By the way, if you were worrying, the spider was okay too. In fact, I half suspect the spider never existed, either that or it made a really quick getaway post-crash.

Running
5km on Friday to pick up a hire car. The long run was yesterday – 32.5km in exactly 2.5 hours. A nice run – not too much fatigue and I felt fine for the rest of the day

Active Feet
I dropped into AF in Heathmont this afternoon. I’d never been there, and was keen to see how my feet might measure up. I tried some Kayano 15s (very good – would consider buying them), some Trances (not so good – quite firm) but unfortunately the guy in the shop was quite definite that Brooks Adrenalines were the ones for me.

Damn it. I’m sick of them. Sadly, I think I’m locked in a vicious cycle. I’ve been running in them so long my feet have adjusted so perfectly to them, nothing else is quite as good.

I’m not going to switch mid-marathon training, but I might consider it later on in the year, just for a change.

bang crash

You know those ads you see on TV sometimes, for car insurance, where some idiot swerves to miss a dog and ends up dumping the car in a nearby lake? They’re kind of amusing, at least at first, but you’d assume those kinds of things don’t actually happen.

I am in a position to assure you that bizarre accidents do happen.

Take my car, or should I say “my old car”.

On Monday night, my beloved was reversing out of our driveway on the way to the shops when she saw a big spider on the passenger seat. She attempted to shoo it away, but it wouldn’t be shooed. She decided she’d head back into the driveway and go get a broom but forgot she was in reverse. She ended up shooting out of the driveway, backwards, at high speed across a pretty busy road, shooting up a slope on the other side of the street and slamming into a tree.

That clearly wasn’t dangerous enough, so the car proceeded to roll back across the street before coming to an inelegant halt against our front fence.

No-one was injured, thankfully, aside from some bruises. The car, however, is in dire straights. It looks like someone tried to crush it into one of those cubes they do at the wreckers, but got bored half way through.

It’s most definitely an ex-car.

The tree’s okay, except for the imprint of my licence plate about a metre off the ground.

Drama….

Running
Not quite so dramatic, an 18.5km slog of a run last night, from my place down to Blackburn and back. Today I’ll be forced into a bit of a run to the car hire place. Looking out the window, I imagine I’ll be a bit on the soggy side by the time I get there.

I don’t get Susan Boyle

As always, I’m at least a few days behind the news. Three quarters of the known universe have watched the clip on YouTube, bought the t-shirt and gone on to talk about something else, but it’s only really today I’ve taken any interest in this Susan Boyle person.

Just in case you managed to miss it, here’s the clip on YouTube.

The story, as far as I understand it, is this: a woman in her 40s, a little plain looking and with an eccentric sense of humour, entered a TV talent show and did a good job singing a song from Les Miserables.

This is supposed to be, in some way, a life-changing, uplifting, amazing moment that had the judges desperately trying to cry through botoxed eyes.

By my way of thinking, it’s only really life-changing if you’ve gone through life assuming 47 year-old women can’t sing, or do anything really.

In short, it’s only really amazing if you’re an idiot.

By way of proof, here’s a comment by “nunally23” left on the YouTube page:

omg omg omg she can sing really really really good i cant belive that omg omg omg i need som water now.

Or perhaps I’m missing the point. I often do. Enlighten me, if you can.

Running
I wasn’t able to run on Monday, due to work and a rather dramatic evening. (I’ll tell you the story as soon as the libel lawyers clear it). I ran 13.3km on Tuesday afternoon, and 12.5km last night. I have another run scheduled for tonight, in the wind, which I’m not looking forward to particularly.

Sometime last night I passed 1,000 for the year. This month looks like the biggest so far – I’m expecting up to 350km or thereabouts.

dumpling detox

There’s only one real problem with dumplings. Actually, there are probably more, but I choose not to think about the kitchen where they were made, what goes into them, what they were cooked in, and the necessity to line up for 15 minutes on Tattersalls Lane to get them.

Apart from all of that, there’s only one thing wrong with them – they’re too addictive.

I’ve been rather good on that score, having turned down offers for almost a year. I’m a saint, I know.

Sadly, the thought that various running types from the Ausrun forum were undergoing a severe detox at the moment perversely made we hungry for dumplings. I’m not sure why.

Anyway, Rachel and I headed down to the Shanghai Dumpling Restaurant and hoovered up a big plate of them. We even tried the dumplings in chilli sauce (okay for a change).

Now I feel like one big dumpling, and in need of a detox.

Running
I was feeling tired again this morning, but pushed on running nevertheless. 13.4km up and down the Yarra around the city. I should add I wasn’t actually IN the Yarra, just on the bike tracks.

at last, a good running shirt

If your physical form is slightly below the ideal; if, like me, your body is – how to put this? – somewhat lacking in grace, beauty and athleticism, then finding clothing to wear while exercising is a pretty fraught process.

I notice lots of girls at the moment going for the uniform of some species of black tights below the waist and a pinky-peach-coloured top above. That seems to work okay for them, but I don’t think it’s a unisex look, particularly.

For me, shorts are a disaster. Actually, it’s the legs that are the disaster, but finding shorts to cover them up appropriately is pretty stressful too.

Shirts aren’t so bad, generally, although you can still go wrong. I bought last year’s (2008) Run for the Kids event t-shirt in a fit of charity and optimism about the size of my “pecs”. It didn’t fit, was a yucky colour and was hopeless to run in, oweing to the fact it ended up dripping with sweat and weighing a tonne in about 3 minutes.

This year I held off buying one until race day, so I could have a look at them first. I did buy one on the day, and boy am I happy.

It’s possibly the best running shirt I’ve ever had. It fits me, it’s light and soft and doesn’t get heavy with sweat. I’ve only had it 10 days and I think I’ve worn it 4 times already.

Good stuff.

Running
I was, and am, severely sleep-deprived today, so I didn’t expect much from my lunch-time run. Still, you never know if you don’t try, so I headed up to Princes Park for a tempo session. It turned out pretty well, even in the wind. I did 7 minutes fast, 3 minutes normal, then 7 minutes fast, then 3 minutes normal. With warmup and cool down it turned out a smidgen over 12.5km.